Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age
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 Augé 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 up in our personal and cultural neuroses. With an ethnologist’s understanding of construct and practice, Augé proves age is unrelated to the development of consciousness, desire, and representations of the self. In bold, eye-opening strokes, he isolates age as a physical marker and casts one’s youthful approach to the world as the true measure of life’s value.
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Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age
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 Augé 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 up in our personal and cultural neuroses. With an ethnologist’s understanding of construct and practice, Augé proves age is unrelated to the development of consciousness, desire, and representations of the self. In bold, eye-opening strokes, he isolates age as a physical marker and casts one’s youthful approach to the world as the true measure of life’s value.
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Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

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Overview

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 Augé 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 up in our personal and cultural neuroses. With an ethnologist’s understanding of construct and practice, Augé proves age is unrelated to the development of consciousness, desire, and representations of the self. In bold, eye-opening strokes, he isolates age as a physical marker and casts one’s youthful approach to the world as the true measure of life’s value.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780231541596
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Publication date: 04/26/2016
Series: European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 96
File size: 226 KB

About the Author

Marc Augé is director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His most well-known book in English is Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. He is also the author of The Future; No Fixed Abode: Ethnofiction; Oblivion; and In the Metro.

Columbia University Press

Table of Contents

The Wisdom of the Cat
As Age Approaches
How Old Are You?
Autobiography and Ethnology of Self
Class
Images d'Épinal
Looking Your Age
The Age of Things and the Age of Others
Aging Without Age
Nostalgia
Everyone Dies Young
Notes
Index

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