Stories of Old Age

***
“Aging is no accident. It is necessary to the human condition, 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.”
 
James Hillman, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, New York, 1999, p. xiii
 
 
 
***
In his History of Old Age: From Antiquity to the Renaissance, Georges Minois writes that regardless of their attitudes and approaches, all societies fear old age, attempting to repel it with rites of rebirth. Regardless of whether old people are slaughtered or respected, abandoned or cared for, nobody wants to be them. Fear of old age – a drama personal and social – was equally forceful in primitive societies as it is in our contemporary civilisation. There remains only one truly efficient remedy for this fearful and mysterious ailment: eternal youth. All else is a half-measure. Humanity has been seeking such remedy ever since the world began. Since time immemorial, old age has been the one truly incurable disease; all helpless people can do is alleviate the pain.
 
Based on Georges Minois, History of Old Age: From Antiquity to the Renaissance, transl. by S.H. Tenison, Chicago, 1989
 
 
 
***
“Could art become one of those ‘rites of rebirth’? Or is it no more than a half-measure, useful in assuaging the anguish of existence? Does the Ars longa, vita brevis adage remind us rather of the longevity of art, or the shortness of life? Does it explore being – or transience?”
 
Maria Poprzęcka, Uczta bogiń. Kobiety, sztuka i życie [The Goddesses’ Feast. Women, Art and Life], Warszawa 2012, p. 190
 
 
 
***
The Stories of Old Age exhibition does not attempt to answer the question what old age is. Please approach it as a quest for “rites of rebirth” and the “imaginative idea”.