Meaning

One human life, told in ten parts, from the first breath to the last: birth, ages 2 to 7, 8 to 12, the teens, the twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties and early seventies, and very old age. An epilogue sits at a deathbed. The book’s claim is simple. Every child is born able to be stopped by the world: a beetle on the sidewalk, a song on the car radio, a face. Growing up covers that over, one reasonable correction at a time. The rest of life is the work of getting it back. Each part opens with a scene (a four-year-old and a beetle, a flashlight under the covers, a kitchen window at 5:47 in the morning, an eighty-three-year-old watching a sparrow) and then brings in the people who have thought hardest about that age: Plato, Augustine, Rumi, Wordsworth, Keats, Rilke, Frankl, Jung, Erikson, Heschel, Simone Weil, the Stoics, and the Navajo, Lakota, Māori, Sikh and Zen traditions. This is not a self-help book and it does not promise answers. About 41,000 words. The Preface and Part One are free to read.

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