by John Allen Paulos

Bertrand Russell’s advice for aging gracefully is rather simple: Broaden your horizons. He recommends that we should try to expand our interests and concerns. Doing so will help us become less focused on ourselves and more open to the world around us. He adds metaphorically, “An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”
I think to a large extent people tend to do this naturally. Businessmen often become less concerned with their assets and money and more with their larger family and society as they get older. Likewise lawyers frequently grow tired of having their briefs in a tangle and mellow out as they age. A similar phenomenon holds for athletes, academics, and workers of all sorts.
Of course, not everybody follows Russell’s counsel. Some remain hard-charging and a few so much so that they resemble the man in Tolstoy’s “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”Given the opportunity to possess all the land he can walk around in one day, the man’s greed leads to his death and thus provides the answer to the question in the title. A man needs about 6 feet by 2 feet by 4 feet – enough for a grave. More appealing is Dylan Thomas’ contrary exhortation not to “go gentle into that good night” but rather “to rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Notwithstanding Tolstoy and Thomas, the rocks and waterfalls of a life do tend for most people to give rise to a desire for calmer waters. Sticking with Russell’s metaphor suggests that in the limit we might arrive at what the French Nobel laureate Romain Rolland first termed in a letter to Freud the “oceanic feeling,” a sensation of eternity and of being one with the world. Stated differently, our personal identity slowly fades and is replaced by an impersonal cosmic one. Read more »