In developed countries, people in their sixties are enormously healthier than their peers from, say, 100 years ago (or from today’s Ukraine). They are active, energetic, engaged, they look and feel young. Good healthcare, good cosmetics, good hygiene, and good abundant food retard physical aging dramatically. I remember the feeling of complete shock when my mother and I traveled to her native village in Ukraine and met an ancient old lady who turned out to be my mother’s former classmate. The woman looked like she could easily be my mother’s grandmother.
The greatest problem of aging lies in the area where you can’t buy off disintegration with money or technological advances. A tendency towards intellectual rigidity sets in human beings at around the age of 35. If very specific efforts are not made to combat it, we see beautiful, physically agile and spry 60-year-olds who, sadly, are nowhere nearly as agile intellectually.
Intellectual labor doesn’t stave off this rigidity. All of those professors who keep teaching pretty much the same thing for decades, scholars who keep rewriting the same idea they had 30 years ago, and intellectuals who recycle the old instead of generating the new are all products of this affliction.
Intellectual rigidity makes people incapable of finding fresh solutions to problems, gets them bogged down in endless feuds that last forever and start because of something incredibly trivial, and makes them an intolerable burden on collagues and family members. Since these folks possess a lot of physical energy, they can create quite a lot of disruption.
It is very important to start battling intellectual rigidity as early as possible. Most people don’t even notice the moment when their reading list begins to slide more and more towards the Franzens, the Wolitzers, mystery, sci fi, fantasy, or YA. I know several academics who honestly believe they read a lot but who have not read more than 3 serious books last year. And this is just one area where rigidity sets in. What people watch, what they talk about, what they do in their free time – it is easy to get bogged down but it’s hard to get one’s intellect back to full-time work once it’s been idling for a while.
Clarissa's Blog 
Some academics study sci fi professionally. 🙂
LikeLike
The greatest amount of time usually goes to theory and secondary sources for academics.
LikeLike
You had me until you got to fantasy and sci fi. Some people need to read MORE fantasy and sci fi. The Young Adult genre has some serious support from people who I respect, and I am going to read Jo Walton’s Among Others on their recommendation. It’ll be the first YA book I’ve read in ages.
LikeLike
People should read whatever they want but when they consume nothing more serious than that, they will not develop. I’m a great fan of the mystery genre but it can’t be all I ever read or I will turn into a rigid old lady who only cares about gossip.
LikeLike
“People should read whatever they want but when they consume nothing more serious than that …”
Last week’s acquisitions included works by Saul Kripke, Rabindranath Tagore, Georges Perec, and Tzvetan Todorov — how precisely am I going to become more serious than this?
I am concerned that your advice would turn me into an academic version of Morrissey, where I would wax along in semi-poetic tones about how difficult literature makes me a difficult person, eventually wishing upon the masses great intellectual violences such as General Semantics, for instance. 🙂
“But I was such a quotidian questioner, until someone gave me a quart of Quine, followed by a Peirce-ing chaser, just to combobulate my mind …”
*ahem* 🙂
LikeLike
I don’t think you are in any danger of getting intellectually rigid in the next 200 years. 🙂
LikeLike
I can’t relate to this at all. I guess most people have not been historically destabilised.
LikeLike
I agree completely! It’s very easy to fall into ruts of various sorts (ruts of thinking, reading, watching, eating, working, etc.) and you really do have to be active in combating them.
To combat my own tendency to fall into ruts I started keeping a list of all the new things I do/experience. I include items from all areas of life; books and films, going to plays, concerts and lectures, trying new restaurants and new foods, trying new activities, etc. I have a prompt on my computer to update this list for the previous week every Monday morning. I am definitely happiest when my weeks have lots of entries and entries from various areas of life. But it’s also hard to squeeze in new things when work or other things keep you busy. I’ve had more than a few weeks in which I had nothing to add when I updated my list on Monday. That’s the advantage of keeping the list, it nudges me into action when I see that I don’t have anything to add.
LikeLike
I am a dilettante (polite name for ADHD 😉 ) and love to mix up my for-fun reading. Current or recent: Edmund White, Farewell Symphony (autobiographical fiction); Mary Gentle, The Black Opera (alternate-history fantasy involving bel canto opera – yum); Wells ed. The Photography Reader (essays by Barthes, Sontag, other theoreticians, photographers); Marusya Bociurkiw, Comfort Food for Breakups (food memoir), some technical stuff on film developing chemistry, and for video documentary, James Balog, “Chasing Ice” (photographic documentation of glacier collapse due to global warming).
Science fiction is under-rated by a lot of “serious” readers. It can be difficult to find the good books if you stick to brand-name book reviews and anthology periodicals (NYRB, London RB, Book Forum, NYTBR, Granta, etc). Good science fiction/fantasy should play with ideas. Good SF/F may or may not adhere to an interesting style. If a story has a pedestrian style but also has an interesting scientific speculation driving the story, many readers will consider it a successful story. Conversely there can be stories based on traditional tales that are given a new interpretation and a pleasing style.
LikeLike
I find it useful to read portions of books in an appropriate setting …
For example, I highly suggest reading certain parts of JG Ballard’s “High Rise” whilst travelling through the awful, blocky modernist high rise towers south of Canary Wharf on the DLR.
Afterwards, you can imagine the hordes in the book descending on the Waitrose in the bottom of 1 Canada Square, abandoning all pretence of civility when purchasing sweets and crisps.
Imagine all of the silly fun you can get into this way.
Think of this as the pursuit of psychogeography in literature. 🙂
(A horrid thought occurred to me: Will Self might yet make a book out of this …)
LikeLike
“Afterwards, you can imagine the hordes in the book descending on the Waitrose in the bottom of 1 Canada Square, abandoning all pretence of civility when purchasing sweets and crisps.”
– Hilarious. :-))))))))
LikeLike