The writer feels panic. Why? She is just about to reach her fiftieth birthday.
What a fate to discover you have passed out of your 40’s! It’s enough to make any sensible woman cry out to plastic surgeons for help. And that’s what this woman, Daphne Merkin, has been doing in a scene she evokes in her first sentence: while lying in bed, she peruses a book by one such surgeon explaining what he can do for someone desperate for a makeover.
If her article “Keeping the Forces of Decrepitude at Bay” in the New York Times Sunday Magazine of May 2nd is any indication, Daphne Merkin qualifies as a clever writer. Full of post-modern pizzazz, this essay also provides pages of morose entertainment about aging.
The writer’s main theme details the horrors of advancing to mid-life. Here, in brief, is the way Merkin regards her future as it unfolds from 50: “All I can see in front of me is a decades-long campaign of vigilantly keeping the forces of decrepitude at bay as I totter forward over the next 15 years into first the demographic embrace of the ‘young-old …; then into the trembling clutches of the ‘old old’ (the over-75’s); and then, if the fates and my genes are so inclined, finally into the company of the ‘oldest old.’”
That’s all she can see ahead of her: decrepitude and membership in age categories that grow in undesirability. There is simply no light shining through these advances in years; she talks about them “in the spirit of defeat” rather than with a feeling of liberation.
No doubt Merkin’s article has reached a wide readership because it gives such modish expression to the malaise of contemporary life among the rich and famous. But I wonder why the Times chose to print an article that shows so little awareness of the creative possibilities now open to middle-aged Americans by reason of greater longevity. That the piece also displays such remarkably little wisdom about human life in general also distresses me.
She has narrowed the flourishing of human life to the appearance of her own body parts. Should you have failed to entrust yourself to the surgeon’s knife by age 50, you are destined to have the face of a hag, she says at one point.
She fears having taken action too late: “Ideally I should have been vigilantly proactive since about the age of 13. How have I let myself slip over the boundary into the dreaded category of the discernibly aging woman?”
The key word here is perhaps “discernibly.” If you have wealth and leisure, you can devote a great deal of effort to the surface you present to the world.
This approach reduces living to external appearance; one’s plastic surgeon looms much larger than any spiritual inspiration ever could. For this woman, eyelids, jowls, and jaw line emerge as the most important things in life.
Throughout Merkin’s writing there’s no mention of spirit. For her, life seems limited to the corpus, the body at progressive risk of something going wrong. She seems never to have heard of anyone growing in personal stature during the middle and later years.
You would never think there’s a world outside. Merkin does mention once the contrast between a “decadent makeover culture” and the war waged by terrorists “trying to figure out how to blast Western civilization off the map.” But this connection proves only a passing distraction from the real war, that against the aging self.
The domestic world is marginalized as well. Merkin mentions her 14-year-old daughter but she accords little significance to the joys and challenges of motherhood. She seems too centered on her own physical uplift to grant any value to this human role.
The main subject of her essay seems ultimately to be shaped by self-hatred. What a tragedy to have reached 50 years and now have nothing left but decline, degradation, and death! Her shrink does not seem much help: Merkin appears to be still discussing “the scars of her childhood” with this presumably high-priced therapist.
At the end of the essay Merkin has passed her surgical ordeal but the results do not impress anyone else as notable. However, she herself considers “a slight freshening of my expression, a less haggard look around the eyes, a greater definition about the jaw line, the general suggestion of a less worn-out contour” as worth the money and the pain.
This carefully crafted description of the outcome, with its underplayed bathetic estimate of the oh-so-subtle changes wrought in her face, suddenly makes me wonder if I (along with many other readers) have been had. Is Merkin serious or have we all been taken in by a master ironist? Could we been treated to nothing but a satire on the follies of postmodern aspirations for immortality, doomed to defeat?
Richard Griffin