Everyone Dies Young

"We are awash in time, savoring a few moments of it; we project ourselves into it, reinvent it, play with it; we take our time or let it slip away: it is the raw material of our imagination. Age, on the other hand, is the detailed account of the days that pass, the one-way view of the years whose total sum when set forth can stupefy us. Age wedges each of us between a date of birth that, at least in the West, we know for certain and an expiration date that, as a general rule, we would like to defer. Time is a freedom, age a constraint." Marc Auge remembers his beloved childhood cat, who seemed to grow wise with age, though her essential nature remained unchanged. He considers our belief that objects mature, when it is our perception of them that evolves over time. He wonders why public demonstrations of affection between the elderly make the young so uncomfortable and why we torture ourselves with regret at what might have been. Time can be liberating, he finds; it is a resource we can squander or relish. Yet age is a burden, bound by our personal and cultural neuroses.With an ethnologist's understanding of construct and practice, Auge isolates age from the development of consciousness, desire, and representations of the self. In bold, eye-opening strokes, he casts age as a physical marker and treats one's youthful approach to the world as the true measure of life's value.

This book is a delight to read, a real joy that has its reader looking at the aging process anew and laughing (or at least chuckling) throughout. Auge's insight on aging is edifying, even uplifting, and makes us reconsider the otherwise bleak pronouncement 'everyone dies young' in a new, more hopeful light. -- Brian J. Reilly, Fordham University Auge looks at how people - himself included - confront their age at different moments in their lives; what it means to 'assume' one's age and how events mark our lives. There are, in our time, no writers who possess similar ease and command in turning autobiography into anthropology. -- Tom Conley, Harvard University

Marc Auge is director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is also the author of Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (1995); The Future (2015); No Fixed Abode: Ethnofiction (2013); Oblivion (2004); and In the Metro (2002). Jody Gladding is a poet who has translated more than twenty works from French.