TY - BOOK ID - 136750924 TI - Middle age PY - 2009 SN - 131748844X 1317488458 1315710277 1283456729 9786613456724 1844654311 9781844654314 9781317488453 9781317488446 9781315710273 9781283456722 6613456721 9781844651658 1844651657 PB - Stocksfield : Acumen, DB - UniCat KW - Middle age KW - Philosophy. KW - Adulthood. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:136750924 AB - Middle age, a time when the body is both at a peak and at the beginning of collapse, marks, for many, a period for radical reappraisal of ones life and way of living. The sense of time running out can lead to a period of dramatic self doubt. In Middle Age, the philosopher Christopher Hamilton explores the moods, emotions and experiences of middle age, seeking to describe and analyse that period of life philosophically. Drawing on the experience of his own epiphanic mid-life crisis as well as a range of writers from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, to Larkin and Eliot Hamilton presents a thought-provoking and candid analysis of the nature of middle age. In a compelling narrative, Hamilton explores many of the themes of mid life nostalgia, the loss of ones youth, the giving up of plans, restlessness, feelings of self-doubt, guilt, regret, loneliness, the search for identity, the sense that life has become boring or has ground to a halt, and the heightened awareness of the compromised nature of life. Yet, although the picture Hamilton paints is bleak, it is not without hope. Middle age is shown to bring its own melancholic wisdom: having gained some distance from a youthful sense of our own importance, it is a time that offers us a position from which we can value the sheer spectacle of life and appreciate its small pleasures. And it is in mid life that, in coming to see the ways in which we are each inadequate, ridiculous, or hopeless, and in realizing the necessity of coming to terms with the kind of person we are, we are able to become more tolerant of ourselves and of those around us. In revealing his own struggle to make sense of the emotions that mid life can bring, Hamilton provides fascinating and uncompromising insights into the essence of middle age, a time when, as Orwell wrote, we all have the face we deserve. ER -