Winter Light

In the contemporary West, the elderly are regarded as somehow "other," no longer who they used to be, no longer full members of the worlds they once inhabited. Being old is seen as a medical management issue. But old age is not a defective version of what preceded it; it is, like childhood, adolescence, and middle age, its own time of life with its own challenges and gifts. Winter Light: On Late Life's Radiance is an exploration of old age as a time when sudden and uncontrollable losses reveal and clarify patterns of existence formerly obscured. Penick tells of the lives of artists, musicians, and others who, in old age, changed radically through visionary modes of experience: Titian, Michelangelo, Beethoven, Rabindranath Tagore, Jean Rhys, Andrea Palladio, Paul Cézanne, Leoš Janáček, Igor Stravinsky, and others. In five essays, concerned respectively with body, connection, pattern, loss, and vision, Winter Light explores irretrievable losses and dawning possibilities.