By Danny Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan –While a large part of American culture and bio-medicine is taken up with either living forever (or at least to 120 or more) or promoting youth culture at the expense of facing the realities of aging, author Daniel Klein has in mid-70s taken a few steps back in time to ask if Americans even know how to age or what it takes to age gracefully.
In his new book Travels With Epicurus and playfully subtitled “A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life,’ Klein, who studied philosophy at Harvard in the 1960s and went on to a career as a television writer and novelist, has asked a very important and yet piercing question: why is everyone in America so afraid of aging?
It’s not the kind of book to engender bestseller status or TV talk show headlines. American culture is more fixated on preventing and covering up aging than accepting for what it is: a natural process of the human body and mind from birth to death. This is not something Hollywood stars want to be seen talking about, but Klein, who made a big splash a few years ago as the co-author (with Harvard classmate Tom Cathcart) with the bestelling philosophy/humor book Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar, has gone where most how-to book writers today fear to tread.
I’ve known Klein, the son of a New Jersey scientist, for over a decade, ever since we first made email contact about a book he and his Dutch wife Freke Vuijst wrote about Jewish culture titled The Half-Jewish Book: A Celebration. And from our email chats over the years, from his home office in western Massachusetts to my electronic cave in Taiwan, I’ve also met his wife and their daughter Samara — and recently their grand-daughter Eliana.
When I asked Klein the other day about his new book and who he hoped to attract as readers, both young and old, he told me: “Along the way, academic philosophy has lost contact with the basic question, ‘What is the best way to live ?’ That’s the question most of us have to wrestle with, and it’s a pleasure to consider it by reading the ancient Greek philosophers.”
Good advice for readers in their 20s and 30s — and 50 and 60s — and while Klein settles in for another bone-chilling New England winter, he’s probably the youngest 70-something on the planet. That’s because he lives a life filled with playful humor and comedic angst, and counts friendship and family as the main pillars of happiness. In short, he’s a mensch.
The Half-Jewish Book was Daniel and Freke’s collection of essays, interviews, , holiday menus and song lyrics, and it made a splash when it was published, with both Jews and non-Jews — and half-Jews! It was that kind of book.
The new book asks some very tough questions about life and death — and how we age in America — and while writing resonated with me from beginning to end, I doubt there is a big audience for this kind of book. Unfortunately, anti-aging sells, aging doesn’t.
In the land of anti-aging creams to facelifts and worse, Klein’s powerful story is probably going to hit a wall of hard denial and mockery. But someone had to write this kind of book, and Klein has done it very well. One could say: We age, therefore we are. There is nothing to be afraid of, or shouldn’t be.
By the way, at 63, I’m almost Ringo Starr’s “When I’m 64” and I’m looking forward to the next 20 years. With Klein’s book on my bookshelf now, I fear nothing.
So before you draw up a “bucket list” of the 1,000 places you want to go before you die, sit down and read this im;portant book. Getting older year by year should not be the butt of jokes on late-night television talk shows. Take a sweet, wine-infused trip with Mr Klein as his navigates between the Greek islands and America. I did, and I enjoyed the views.
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Bloom is Taiwan bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World and an inveterate web surfer. He may be contacted at dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com