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Posts Tagged ‘Priscilla Long’

Virginia Woolf didn’t get old—not what we call old—but she brooded about aging,VW Diary Vol. 5 increasingly so in middle age.

Shortly before her 50th birthday, she wrote in her diary:

Can we count on another 20 years? I shall be fifty on 25th and sometimes feel that I have lived 250 years already and sometimes that I am still the youngest person on the omnibus” – Diary 4, 1/13/32)

Her ambivalence was predicated on her writing. When it was going well, she was contented and high—“divinely happy & pressed with ideas” (D4, 1/16/34). If it wasn’t, she was “so old, so ugly, & can’t write” (D5, 3/11/39).

The clock ticks for us all

Woolf’s experience isn’t unique. After 40 or 50, we hear the clock ticking, feel age creeping up on us. We fend it off, stay active and engaged, but we can’t deny the inevitable. We get old, and as we do, our creativity and productivity become increasingly challenged. We face and fear disability, dementia, decline, death. We’re subjected to increasing ageism from without and self-doubt from within. How can we sustain a positive mindset?

In the recently published Dancing with the Muse in Old Age (Coffeetown Press, 2022), Priscilla Long proposes looking at creativity in old age “as a potentially dynamic and productive time full of connections to others and deeply satisfying work.”

Our advantage is experience, the skills we’ve learned and exercised over time, not just technical and craft skills but also the attitudes and ways of working that Long calls meta-skills.

In her own case, she says, “I have learned how to learn. I have learned how to focus, how to break a problem down into its component parts, how to encourage myself, how to take my time when venturing into new territory.”

Continuing to create

Dancing With the Muse reinforces extensive research and scientific findings with examples of women and men, most in the arts, who continued to be creative and productive well into old age. Long cites more than 100 artists and musicians, scientists and athletes, and writers, including Margaret Atwood, Maya Angelou, Iris Murdoch, and Doris Grumbach (a Woolf enthusiast who died last year at 104). And Leonard Woolf!

Among those whose creative output in their later years included “looking back, remembering, and articulating one’s life and its meanings,” Leonard Woolf wrote his five-volume autobiography in his last decade. Had she lived to old age, I believe Virginia Woolf would have expanded her self-writing, extending the autobiographical work in Moments of Being.

This is Priscilla Long’s sixth book, including two volumes of poetry, an essay collection, and a writing manual. At 79, she has several works in progress, her goal to publish ten more books while making sure to clock her 10,000 steps every day. Virginia Woolf didn’t have a Fitbit, but her miles over the Downs and around London were conducive to her physical and mental health and stimulated her creativity.

Poised to shoot forth arrows

The painter Robert Motherwell said at age 71 that “to retire from painting would be to retire from life.” I’m certain that “old Virginia,” as she liked to refer to her future self in her early diaries, would have concurred and would have continued to write. At 50, she declared herself “poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are. I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun” (D4, 10/2/32).

When an acquaintance worried that his creative well would run dry, she observed that her concern was quite the opposite; she wondered if she would have enough time to write everything that was in her head.

Days before her death at 59, she reminded herself to “Observe perpetually. Observe the oncome of age. I insist upon spending this time to the best advantage. Suppose I selected one dominant figure in every age and wrote round and about. Occupation is essential” (D5, 3/8/41).

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Fire and Stone by Priscilla Long is an outstanding collection of personal essays encompassingfire-stone Priscilla’s life and family, her reflections on being an activist in Boston in the sixties, forays into science, literary influences, and more. Disclosure: In addition to being a remarkable writer, Priscilla is a good friend and my writing mentor.

I enjoyed reading in her essay “Throwing Stones” about how she “entered into the shadowy realm of American rebellion, into the sixties of pickets and protests and street marches and flag burnings … and danced all night and marched against the war and read Gramsci and Marx and Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf….”

But I was surprised when I found references to Mrs. Dalloway in two more essays in the same section: “The Musician” and “Dressing.” I knew Priscilla admired Woolf’s work, but I didn’t think she’d been a significant influence. So I asked her, “What’s with this?” She replied that she had written the essays at different times, had assembled the collection in a fitting order, but hadn’t realized there were Woolf references in three closely-sequenced essays.

When I delved into Woolf references in contemporary fiction* several years ago, I noted how they often were positioned to identify a time or a milieu in young women’s lives. They do that in Priscilla’s essays, but these aren’t fiction—Priscilla and her feminist cohort were reading A Room of One’s Own; young women were pondering the life and times of Clarissa Dalloway. I still find fictional references, and I read a number of personal essays every week. I frequently come across writers’ tributes to Woolf’s influence, or references to her novels or characters. Posters still hang in dorm rooms; Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse are on many a beside table of many a woman, young and old, in fiction and in life.

*Editor’s Note: Alice Lowe’s monograph, Beyond the Icon: Virginia Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, is available from Cecil Woolf Publishers. You can also find more posts about Woolf in contemporary fiction.

 

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