Beowulf remembers a northern heroic world through three combats that join glory to mortality. Hrothgar's hall Heorot, built as a center of gift-giving and song, becomes a place of terror when Grendel attacks the sleeping retainers.
Medical tag
Aging Senescence
Old age, bodily decline, longevity.
Works
Freud's late essay, in German Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ('the uneasiness in culture'), asks why civilized people, who have built so much for their own protection, are so often unhappy. It is written in eight short chapters in a conversational, self-questioning style.
This Paine anthology gathers the pamphlets that made revolutionary argument feel urgent, portable, and democratic. Common Sense, published in January 1776, attacks monarchy, hereditary succession, reconciliation with Britain, and political hesitation.
Death Comes for the Archbishop follows Jean Marie Latour and Joseph Vaillant, French missionary priests sent to the newly annexed American Southwest to organize the Catholic Church in New Mexico. Cather shapes the novel less as a conventional plot than as a sequence of remembered journeys, encounters, hardships, and acts of pastoral administration.
Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem covers the last twenty-four hours or so of Willy Loman, a sixty-three-year-old travelling salesman, interwoven with his memories and imaginings of the past. Willy returns early to his small Brooklyn house, now hemmed in by apartment buildings, because he can no longer keep the car on the road: his mind keeps drifting.
The Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences was published anonymously in Leiden in 1637 as a preface to three scientific essays, the Dioptrics, the Meteors and the Geometry. Descartes wrote it in French rather than Latin so that readers using their natural reason, including women, could judge it without scholastic training, and he presented it not as a treatise but as a history or fable of his own mind.
Early Christian Lives gathers late antique biographies of saints, monks and holy figures, often including Athanasius’ Life of Antony and Jerome’s lives of Paul, Hilarion and Malchus. These works do not present biography as neutral chronology.
Montaigne called his pieces essais, 'trials' or 'attempts', and the word names both a method and a new literary genre. The book gathers 107 chapters in three books, ranging from one-page notes on thumbs, smells and names to the sprawling 'Apology for Raymond Sebond', which fills a sixth of the whole.
Bacon's Essays, or Counsels, Civil and Moral, grew over almost thirty years from a slim volume of ten pieces in 1597 to fifty-eight in the final edition of 1625, the text used here. Bacon borrowed the name essay from Montaigne, but where Montaigne explored himself at leisure, Bacon compressed observation into dense, balanced sentences meant for men of business and government.
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver, presents itself as the sober memoir of a ship's surgeon. In Part I, shipwrecked, Gulliver wakes on the shore of Lilliput tied down by people six inches tall.
King Lear begins with a political and familial error: Lear divides Britain according to a public love test, accepts the fluent flattery of Goneril and Regan, rejects Cordelia's plain truth, and banishes Kent for trying to correct him. The abdication leaves Lear with the name of king but without the substance of rule, and the tragedy strips away retinue, shelter, authority, sanity, and finally family.
Letters from a Stoic selects from Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius, a sequence of philosophical letters that turn daily life into training for freedom. Seneca writes as an older adviser to a younger friend, but the letters are also exercises for himself.
Long Walk to Freedom is Mandela's memoir of childhood, political awakening, resistance, imprisonment, negotiation, and democratic transition. It begins in rural Transkei, with family, Thembu traditions, mission schooling, and the gradual widening of Mandela's world through education and urban life.
The Meditations, which Marcus Aurelius may have titled simply 'To Himself', is a private notebook of philosophical reflections written in Greek, probably during his military campaigns on the Danube in the 170s CE. It was not intended for publication and consists of twelve books of entries ranging from single sentences to short essays, often repeated and varied as exercises to fix principles in the mind.
The Metamorphoses is a Latin poem in fifteen books of dactylic hexameter, about 12,000 lines, that strings together some 250 myths of transformation from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar and the reign of Augustus. Its unifying thread is change of form: gods, humans and nymphs become animals, plants, stones, stars and springs, usually at moments of extreme passion, violence or divine punishment.
The Novum Organum ('new instrument') is the second and only substantially completed part of Bacon's projected Instauratio Magna, a six-part plan to rebuild human knowledge from its foundations. Its title throws down a challenge to the Organon, the collection of Aristotle's logical works that had governed university teaching for centuries.
Of Mice and Men takes place over a few days on a ranch near Soledad in California's Salinas Valley during the Depression. George Milton, small and sharp, and Lennie Small, a huge, immensely strong man with an intellectual disability and the mind of a child, are itinerant ranch hands who travel together, unusual among solitary migrant workers.
Persuasion is Austen's last completed novel, a story of second chances. Anne Elliot is the overlooked middle daughter of Sir Walter Elliot, a vain and extravagant baronet of Kellynch Hall in Somerset.
Sense and Sensibility follows two sisters whose temperaments represent the opposed values of its title. When Henry Dashwood dies, Norland Park in Sussex passes to John, his son by a first marriage, who promises to provide for his stepmother and half-sisters but is talked out of any real generosity by his grasping wife Fanny.
Sixty Stories is Donald Barthelme's own selection of his short fiction from roughly two decades, drawn from collections such as Come Back, Dr. Caligari, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, City Life, Sadness, Amateurs and Great Days, together with some previously uncollected pieces.
The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman gathers the evolving work of a poet who made the self expansive enough to contain a democracy. The center is Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised across multiple editions until Whitman's death.
The Fall of the Roman Republic is a selection of six of Plutarch's Roman Lives, arranged to tell the story of the Republic's collapse in the century before Augustus: Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar and Cicero. Read in sequence, they show how military glory, personal ambition and civil war destroyed Rome's traditional government.
The Metaphysical Poets is Helen Gardner's anthology of English poets of the seventeenth century who wrote in the style that Samuel Johnson, borrowing a phrase from Dryden, called 'metaphysical'. Johnson complained that in their verse the most heterogeneous ideas were yoked by violence together; T.
The Nicomachean Ethics asks what the human good is and how a life can be shaped toward it. Aristotle begins from the idea that every craft, inquiry and action aims at some good, and that the highest practical good is eudaimonia, often translated happiness or flourishing.
The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus's long return from Troy to Ithaca and of the household that must survive his absence. The poem opens not with Odysseus but with disorder: his son Telemachus is growing up under the pressure of suitors who consume the estate and demand that Penelope choose a new husband.
The Old Man and the Sea follows Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without taking a fish, as he sails far into the Gulf Stream and hooks a marlin larger than his skiff. Hemingway narrows the plot until skill, endurance, hunger, memory, prayer, and pain are concentrated in one body at sea.
The Rule of St Benedict is a concise manual for forming a stable monastic community. It opens by calling the monastery a school for the Lord’s service and asks what kind of person desires life.
Of the Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right is a compact treatise in four books, the only finished part of a larger work on political institutions that Rousseau abandoned. It opens with its most famous sentence, that man is born free and everywhere in chains, and with a promise not to explain how this happened but to say what could make it legitimate.
This volume pairs two of Henry James's most intense short fictions about possession, interpretation and moral trespass. The Turn of the Screw is framed as a manuscript read aloud during a country-house gathering.
The Twelve Caesars offers biographies of Julius Caesar and the first eleven Roman emperors from Augustus through Domitian. Suetonius does not write history as Tacitus does, with sustained analysis of institutions and causation.
The Warden is a quiet institutional novel about conscience, reform and the human cost of public righteousness. Septimus Harding is the gentle precentor of Barchester Cathedral and warden of Hiram's Hospital, a charitable almshouse for twelve elderly men.
The Waves follows six speaking consciousnesses from childhood to old age: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis. A seventh figure, Percival, never speaks directly but becomes the focus of admiration, desire and grief.
John Adams's Thoughts on Government and selected letters present a founder preoccupied with constitutional balance, civic virtue, law, ambition, and the fragility of republics. Thoughts on Government, written in 1776, argues that new American states should avoid simple unicameral democracy and instead build mixed, balanced institutions with separated powers and independent courts.
Travels with My Aunt begins with retired bank manager Henry Pulling attending his mother's funeral. There he meets his formidable Aunt Augusta, who disrupts his suburban routine and suggests that his family history is less settled than he believed.
Twelve Angry Men takes place almost entirely in a jury room after a murder trial. Twelve male jurors must decide whether a young defendant is guilty of killing his father; a guilty verdict will mean death.
Two Lives of Charlemagne pairs Einhard's Life of Charlemagne with Notker the Stammerer's later anecdotes about the emperor. Einhard writes as a court insider shaped by classical biography, especially Suetonius.
White Nights is narrated by an unnamed young dreamer in St. Petersburg, a lonely man who lives more intensely in imagination than in social life.
Passages
- Beowulf, The mere and the second fight
Beowulf gives this tag concrete force through the medical interest lies in battle wounds, grief, aging kingship, and the social care owed to bodies that have been broken in public violence
- Common Sense, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, and The American Crisis, Rights of Man, social welfare proposals
Paine proposes public measures for poverty and old age, anticipating later welfare and public-health arguments.
- Death Comes for the Archbishop, Mission and encounter
Death Comes for the Archbishop gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens includes travel hardship, hunger, fever, aging, deathbed care, and the bodily cost of missionary life in an arid landscape
- Death of a Salesman, Act One, opening
Willy returns home unable to drive, describing how his mind drifted and he nearly went off the road.
- Death of a Salesman, Act Two, the firing and Charley's office
Willy is fired after decades and remarks that he is worth more dead than alive.
- Discourse on Method, Part VI
Health as the first good; the mind's dependence on bodily organs; hope that medicine could cure diseases of body and mind and the debility of age.
- Essays, Book III, Ch. V, 'Upon Some Verses of Virgil'
Candid reflection on ageing, waning sexual vigour and the body's decline.
- Essays, Book III, Ch. XIII, 'Of Experience'
Detailed personal regimen (sleep, diet, habits) and colic attacks, with the argument that long experience of one's own body outranks medical rules.
- Essays, Essay XXX, Of Regiment of Health
Self-observation as physic, gradual change, Celsus's alternation of fasting and full eating, waking and sleep; passions to avoid; choosing a physician of middle temper.
- Essays, Essays XLII–XLIV, Of Youth and Age, Of Beauty, Of Deformity
Stages of life and bodily appearance as influences on character; deformity as a spur to boldness and ambition.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part III, Ch. 10
The Struldbrugs: immortal, decrepit, forgetful and legally dead at eighty.
- King Lear, The heath
King Lear gives this tag concrete force through lear is central for psychiatry and aging: cognitive vulnerability, rage, delirium, homelessness, trauma, blindness, caregiving, and unbearable grief
- Letters from a Stoic, Letter 1
Time is treated as the one possession that must be reclaimed before life slips away.
- Long Walk to Freedom, Later imprisonment and illness passages
Mandela's aging and health problems, including tuberculosis history, become part of the political story of captivity.
- Meditations, Book 9.3; 12.36
Death as a natural process like birth and growing old; departing serenely.
- Metamorphoses, Book VII
Medea drains Aeson's blood and refills his veins with a magic brew, restoring his youth; the daughters of Pelias are tricked into killing their father.
- Metamorphoses, Book XIV
The Sibyl of Cumae, granted years but not youth, will shrink until only her voice remains.
- Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorism LXXXVII
Impostors who promise prolongation of life, retarding of old age, relief of pain and the exaltation of the intellect discredit honest natural philosophy.
- Of Mice and Men, Section 3
Carlson shoots Candy's old dog; Candy later wishes he had done it himself.
- Sense and Sensibility, Vol. I, Ch. 8
Marianne mocks Colonel Brandon's complaint of rheumatism and his flannel waistcoat as signs of decrepitude.
- Sixty Stories, 'Florence Green is 81'
Portrait of an elderly rich woman and the hangers-on gathered around her.
- The Complete Poems, Late poems
Whitman's later work reflects aging, bodily limitation and spiritual persistence.
- The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, Life of Marius 45
Marius, aged and drinking heavily, falls ill with pleurisy and in delirium imagines himself fighting Mithridates.
- The Nicomachean Ethics, Book 10
The final account of happiness links pleasure, contemplation and a complete life.
- The Old Man and the Sea, Eighty-four days
The Old Man and the Sea gives this tag concrete force through its medical lens is practical and bodily: age, cramps, hand wounds, exhaustion, starvation, pain tolerance, and the dignity of care between santiago and manolin
- The Social Contract, Book III, Chapter XI
The body politic compared to a human body that begins to die at birth; the constitution of man is nature's work, that of the state the work of art and can be prolonged.
- The Social Contract, Book II, Chapter VIII
Peoples, like men, are docile only in youth; aged peoples resist reform like cowardly patients who rave at the sight of the doctor. Revolutions are compared to illnesses that make individuals forget the past, after which a state may be reborn.
- The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, The Aspern Papers, Juliana Bordereau scenes
Juliana's extreme age, guarded privacy and bodily frailty become objects of the narrator's archival opportunism.
- The Warden, Opening chapters
Hiram's Hospital is described as a charitable home for elderly men, establishing dependency, routine and institutional paternalism.
- The Warden, Bold's reform campaign
The bedesmen become subjects of legal and journalistic advocacy, raising consent and representation issues.
- The Waves, Later-life sections
Aging, memory and bodily change alter the voices' relation to desire, ambition and language.
- Thoughts on Government and Selected Letters, Late Adams-Jefferson correspondence
Aging, grief, memory, and mortality shape the retrospective friendship.
- Travels with My Aunt, Opening funeral
Henry's mother's funeral initiates grief, family uncertainty and a late-life identity crisis.
- Travels with My Aunt, Henry's retirement routines
Henry's dahlias and banking habits suggest emotional constriction, safe routine and underused vitality.
- Travels with My Aunt, Augusta's travel stories
Augusta's erotic and criminal memories challenge medicalized assumptions about sexuality and old age.
- Twelve Angry Men, Discussion of witnesses
The jurors test memory, perception, age, stress and inference in eyewitness testimony.
- Two Lives of Charlemagne, Einhard, personal habits section
Charlemagne's clothing, diet, moderation, exercise and swimming present health as part of royal discipline.
- Two Lives of Charlemagne, Einhard, health and death
Charlemagne's fevers, aging and final illness make the emperor's body a political and moral subject.
- White Nights, Nastenka's story
Nastenka's blind grandmother pins her dress as supervision, blending care, disability and confinement.
Quotes
“we could free ourselves from an infinity of maladies of body as well as of mind, and perhaps also even from the debility of age”
“I am in conflict with the worst, the most sudden, the most painful, the most mortal, and the most irremediable of all diseases”
“Would he have long life? who guarantees to him that it would not be a long misery? would he at least have health”
“O Lord, if I am still necessary to your people, I do not shrink from toil: your will be done”
“supported life by the corpses of those who appeared useless for war on account of their age, and did not surrender to the enemy”
“But at my back I always hear / Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near”
“Most peoples, like most men, are docile only in youth; as they grow old they become incorrigible”
“The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries in itself the causes of its destruction”
“Die at the right time: so teacheth Zarathustra”