Aging is no accident. It is necessary to the human conditions, intended by the soul. Aging is built into our physiology; yet, to our puzzlement, human life extends long beyond fertility and outlasts muscular usefulness and sensory acuteness. For this reason we need imaginative ideas that can grace aging and speak to it with the intelligence it deserves. You will find that vision in this book. It offers the promise of refreshing the reader's mind with a shower of insights whose goal is to affect transitions to later years profoundly, even permanently. So, why do we live long?...let us entertain the idea that character requires the additional years and that the long last of life is forced upon us neither by genes nor by conservational medicine nor by societal collusion. The last years confirm and fulfill character. - from the author's A Preface for the Reader (Random House)

Writing about the last of life cannot be an objective study, indifferent to the writer. His or her life is also on the line, so that the writing, if it comes from the heart at all, tells of the writer's character. Authors are characters in their own fictions..."Character" refers to the distinctive qualities of an individual, and can also mean a person in a work of fiction or played on the stage. The word wraps together the peculiarities of the author's individuality, the act of writing, and the book as a stage peopled by imagination. But what kind of writing does an old person do, and how does one do it? ... The tortoise determines the pace. We are borne on its back. Exploring as slow thinking, and thinking as slower writing: the old ones are connoisseurs of lost threads and downtime, because we can't keep up with usual thought. Usual thinking about later years stops at death. That is not the destination of this book, nor is death a bold way to consider aging. What could be more usual than allegories of nature: splendid trees resting on solid trunks; an ancient turtles in the deepest seas; the full savor of aging wines and cheeses ("Ripeness is all")? - from the author's A Preface from the Writer (Random House)

This book consists of three main parts, following the theme of character through three stages. These stages are not the usual three - childhood, maturity, and old age; rather, this book expands upon the changes character undergoes in later life. First, the desire to last as long as one can; then the changes in body and soul as the capacity to last leaves and character becomes more and more exposed and confirmed until a third piece of the puzzle emerges: what is left when you have left. Lasting. Leaving. Left. Three parts, three main ideas. A book that invites the soul into its inquiry draws us inside its labyrinth. A preface tries to lay out the labyrinth on a flat map; it can't do justice, however, to the twists and turns and dark passages, or to the moments when clear light breaks through. Maybe the best this preface can do is to wish the book bon voyage, to acknowledge gratitude that the book exists and that its has found someone's hand and eye, even perhaps someone's mind and heart. - from the author's A Preface to the Book (Random House)

James Hillman is a psychologist, scholar, international lecturer, pioneer psychologist, and the author of more than twenty books, including The Soul's Code, Re-visioning Psychology, Healing Fiction, The Dream and the Underworld, Inter Views, and Suicide and the Soul. A Jungian analyst and originator of post-Jungian "archetypal psychology," he has held teaching positions at Yale University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Dallas, where he co-founded the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.

Also by James Hillman

Re-Visioning Psychology (1975)

The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World (1981/1992)

Kinds of Power: A Guide to its Intelligent Uses (1995)

The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling (1996)

The SunSpotlighted:
The Force of Character And the Lasting Life
by James Hillman
US$24 C$37


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