Following the recent release of his new book ‘The Midlife Mind – Literature and the Art of Ageing’ (Reaktion Books, 2020), Ben Hutchinson, Professor of European Literature in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, examines what it means to be ‘midlife’ in the middle of the pandemic. He said:
‘”Crisis” is a word that is overused, but it certainly applies to 2020. The French term for the crisis of quarantine – la crise de la quarantaine – also conveys what we call in English the “midlife crisis”, happening as it traditionally does around the age of forty. It serves as a pithy summary of our current quandary: by order of the state, human contact has been reduced to a bare minimum. For anyone in their middle years, lockdown has functioned as a marker of mortality, forcing us to reassess what we want from life. Will we be the same person on the other side of our crisis?
‘The idea of the midlife crisis was invented, to all intents and purposes, in the 1960s. The Canadian psychoanalyst Elliot Jaques theorized it in response to seeing patients, around the age of forty, suddenly becoming aware of entering the second half of their lives. As we reach “middle age”, those quotation marks start to dig their claws in, not least because the very idea of middle age is in fact a cultural construct. For one thing it is gendered: we say “life begins at forty”, but the original statement, tellingly, was that “a woman’s life begins at forty”.
‘There is nothing natural about middle age, in other words, at least not as we understand its implications; animals will at some point be in the middle of their lives, but presumably they never start worrying about going grey or putting on weight. Only humans search for the meaning of midlife.
‘According to the cliché, another word for crisis is “opportunity”. But a better term might be “perspective”, and it is this that both midlife and lockdown can offer us. As we emerge from confinement, we might want to think about what it means to begin the second half of our lives.’
Ben Hutchinson has been Professor of European Literature at the University of Kent since 2012. His research ranges widely across European – and especially, German – literature; publications in numerous languages and most recently The Midlife Mind (Reaktion Books, 2020).
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