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Novelist Zadie Smith weighs in on the
great ageing debate and why we need
to celebrate the inevitableTHE SUBJECT AT HAND IS “AGELESSNESS”, a concept
I think I only half-understand. If it means, “Age is just a number,”
or “You’re only as old as you feel,” or “You, too, can look
young forever,” then I know I don’t understand it, or, at least,
it’s an idea that doesn’t mean much to me. I believe age —
and the awareness of age — is one of the few concrete ways
we can measure our progress through this world, and that
each stage of life has its season and something to teach us,
and that either to look or think oneself 27 forever is to
abandon the idea of really living altogether. But if,
by “agelessness”, we are referring to those moments of grace
when time swings and you escape the actual number on your
passport, and find yourself transported backwards, then, yes,
I know that feeling intimately, and it is one of the treasures of
existence. An example: a few days before writing this, I found
in my iTunes a song I didn’t know I had,Apparently Nothin’,
by Young Disciples, a tune I’m quite sure I haven’t danced to
since 1991, but which, I now remembered, I’d once played
day in and day out with as much delight
as I have it in me to experience. So, I was
curious: I pressed play, closed my eyes,
started to dance. And for three and
a half minutes, it really was 1991, both
inside me — in my limbs, and in my mind
— and for all I knew, outside me, too, for
with my eyes closed, it felt entirely
possible that all the rest was a dream,
that I had no adult life, no partner or
children, no job or responsibilities,
and that the 16-year-old soul who had
once loved this tune was still alive within
me and could be awakened at any moment, could perhaps
even take over the rest of the organism, and erase all the
back-pain and saddlebags and wrinkles and weary
experiences that have constituted some of the intervening 26
years since this song first came out. Then I opened my eyes:
I was 42 again. But the lyrics lingered: “I ain’t trying to rule
your mind/A conscious observer trying to find/A place on
earth where they heed the signs...”
It is commonly thought that time is the particular enemy of
women. Because we supposedly have so much to lose:our “looks”, our fertility, our cultural capital. There have been
feminist modifications to this story over the years, but it remains
powerful: a tale long told by men and subsequently retold
and internalised by women. But there are other ways of
looking at it. That women have timepieces built into their
bodies — primarily “biological clocks” and menopause —
signs that must eventually be heeded, signs that are, finally,
impossible to ignore, seems to me at least as much gift as
curse. That our bodies should bring us such concrete signs of
time passing — that they should have the miraculous ability to
bring us news of what is actually the case — surely means that
every woman is offered the opportunity to be, as Young
Disciples have it, a “conscious observer” of her own life.
It strikes me that one consequence of this bodily awareness
of time is that adulthood — with all its complex responsibilities
and demands — often seems to come as less of a surprise to
women than it does to many men (there’s a reason our folk
tales are full of “wise old women”). Our hyper-awareness
may well be a kind of opportunity, one
that might allow even death itself to be
well-imagined and prepared for. And yet,
this unique feminine opportunity to be
wise — to know time as it is, rather than as
we would wish it to be — is almost always
diminished or ridiculed. When we were
teens, for example, and still testing out
ideas of what lay ahead for all of us,
I can remember male friends gleefully
bringing up the matter of Charlie Chaplin,
who, during my youth, was a famous
octogenarian father, and often cited as
a case of male good fortune versus female bad luck: “You’ll
all be finished at 40. But we carry on — we can have babies
into our eighties!” And we will stay attractive, the boys meant
by this, and we will stay vital and potent, while you and your
lot will wither and fade.Even at 16, I could hear the fear and
anxiety hidden deep within this supposed display of male
pride. Was Charlie Chaplin admirable or ridiculous?
You could see these boys weren’t exactly sure: the whole point
of teasing us was to get our assurance one way or another on
this point. And who can blame them for being unsure?>“IT IS COMMONLY
THOUGHT
THAT TIME IS
THE ENEMY
OF WOMEN.
BECAUSE WE
SUPPOSEDLY HAVE
SO MUCH TO LOSE”