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Sixty: A Diary of My Sixty-First Year: The Beginning of the End, or the End of the Beginning?
Sixty A Diary of My Sixty-First Year The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning Author:Ian Brown Ian Brown began keeping a diary of his sixty-fist year with a Facebook post on the morning of February 4, 2014, his sixtieth birthday. As well as wanting to maintain a running tally on how he survived the year, Brown set out to explore what being sixty means physically, psychologically, and intellectually. ?What pleasures are gone forever? Which... more » ones, if any, are left? What did Beethovan, or Schubert, or Jagger, or Henry Moore, or Lucian Freud do after they turned sixty?? And more importantly, ?How much life can you live in the fourth quarter, not knowing when the game might end??
Sixty is a report from the front, a dispatch from the Maginot Line that divides the middle-aged from the soon-to-be elderly. As Ian Brown writes, ?It is the age when the body begins to dominate the mind or vice versa, when time begins to disappear and loom, but never in a good way, when you have no choice but to admit that people have stopped looking your way, and that in fact they stopped looking twenty years ago.? His prose, which has garnered multiple book and journalism awards, has a naked honesty that shocks, delights, and enlightens as he turns his restless eye on himself, and also captures the obsessions of a generation facing the undeniable fact that they are no longer young.
With formidable candor, Brown tries to answer this question: ?Does aging and elderliness deserve to be dreaded?and how much of that dread can be held at bay by a reasonable human being?? For that matter, for a man of sixty, what even constitutes reasonableness?« less