Remaining relevant as you age

Here are some reflections by Kazuo Ishiguro about aging and the potential for fulfillment as you get older.

From Zed – The Boomer Book Club

Link:   EZ - Everything Zoomer

‘I’m looking at people who’ve really managed to turn the aging process into some kind of proper art that’s not self-pitying, that’s not reductive.” 

The last time we spoke, Ishiguro held Leonard Cohen — another of his musical heroes — up as a prime example of brilliant “late style.” And this time around he references Cohen’s posthumous 2019 album Thanks for the Dance. “It’s weird,” he says. “It actually sounds like it’s coming from the other side of the grave … it feels like I’m just sitting by a tombstone in the dark and this voice is coming out of the ground.”

He says Cohen is not exactly a “useful example” of late style because he was brilliant until the end of his life, which isn’t the case for most. “Maybe Leonard Cohen cheats because he was sounding like somebody quite old and looking back from when he was quite young,” Ishiguro adds with a hearty laugh. “So maybe he figured out a strategy. So Leonard’s of no use to me.”

The author once again turns to Bob Dylan — specifically his 1997 album Time Out of Mind, released when the singer was 56.

“Now that I thought was quite useful because it actually showed how you could turn aging itself into sort of beauty,” he says. “It wasn’t an attempt to just carry on doing what he did before in a spritely way. It seemed to me that he was embracing aging in everything — in the songs, in the music itself and in his voice. He wasn’t hiding the fact that his voice was creaky.” 

Ishiguro also says enjoying a successful late style is beneficial to young people, “so they think, ‘Well, it’s not just downhill and decay. I mean, there’s something beautiful. There’s a rich experience there.’ And that’s what I would aspire to.”