[Quoting Dr. Donald Stuss is the vice president of research at the Rotman Research Institute, Toronto] “Our studies with the elderly show that the one thing you get with age is wisdom. You’ve got this affective responsiveness, this emotional experience. Somebody once asked me whether there was any benefit to aging, because there seems to be little that’s positive about the body’s physical deterioration. I answered by saying that there is something positive, but it’s more spiritual than physical. If your physical stuff gets peeled away, what do you have left? You have your self, your memories, and your history; and those are your spiritual parts. What is a midlife crisis—it’s preparation for aging. Some people say it’s an assessment of ‘What have I done?’ I would say it’s an assessment of ‘Who am I?’ You are forced, if you can meet the challenge of aging, to develop truly as a human being.”
The above gets personal at my age.
Here's the truth: Unless accompanied by a heavy carb load, fat shouldn't make you fat. Carbs are the perpetrator of our obesity and diabetes epidemics.
I believe that the above statement is likely accurate. Damn!
Science, the form of immediacy perception par excellence, can never answer this question. It can never tell us why a sunset or a string quartet is beautiful. This is no argument against science, merely an acknowledgment of its limits.
Writing biography becomes another “impossible profession,” Janet Malcolm’s characterization of psychoanalysis. Impossible, because the person whom biography purports to be about is not altogether a person, as the case an analyst works with is the invisible psyche, brought in by a person. Biographers are ghost writers, even ghost busters, trying to seize the invisible ghosts in the visibilities of a life. A biography that sticks to the facts as closely as it can finds ever clearer traces of the invisible, those symptoms, serendipities, and intrusive inventions that have led, or pursued, the life the biography recounts.
In order to talk about imagination we must use imagination and in order to talk about language we must use language. We can’t get behind them or stand apart from them, as detached observers, as we can with something in the physical world, but must understand them from ‘inside’. That, in fact, is what Barfield set out to do.
