Author Talk: “Time’s Bounty: Rethinking Aging,” by Philip Weinstein

The Vineyard Haven Library is pleased to celebrate the release of Professor Philip Weinstein’s new book of essays, “Time’s Bounty: Rethinking Aging,” with a reading and reception at 5:00 pm on Thursday, November 13th. This event will be held at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center, located at 130 Center Street in Vineyard Haven. Refreshments will be provided by the Friends of the Library, and books available for onsite purchase through Bunch of Grapes Bookstore. Free and open to the public. No registration required. 

Our culture isn’t kind towards age. The dominant drive is to celebrate youth, striving for more and more of everything, while age, we’re told, brings only depletion and loss. Even as Americans live longer, most consider old age with dread. It’s time to challenge these assumptions. “Time’s Bounty” is a bracing view of the surprises that lie ahead, as age enkindles in us new expressions of life. 

“Old-age situations, assumed to announce the end-of-the-road, actually generate fresh life-moves,” writes author Philip Weinstein. “As we age, we tend to become ‘lighter’ in more senses than one....Indeed, we may find ourselves catapulted into late-stage ‘adventures’ the young never dream of.”

“Time’s Bounty” offers a view of age that differs greatly from our preconceptions—surprising, emancipating, sometimes even joyful. In five brief chapters, the author takes us from the generative discoveries that age occasions to the freedom that comes in life’s late chapters, when no company or institution or cause any longer owns us. At last, we are our own, in ways we could not imagine when younger.

Weinstein, a retired professor of English, draws not only on his own insights but on the insights found in writers he taught for decades: Shakespeare, Yeats, Proust, Faulkner, Eliot, Beckett, and others. Brief forays into their imaginative works add further illumination to the author’s own discoveries regarding the dramas—both the trials and the gifts—of old age.

Philip Weinstein earned his PhD in English from Harvard University, staying on to teach at Harvard for the next 3 years. He then accepted a position at Swarthmore, where he remained for over 40 years, becoming Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English. He has written several books of literary criticism, many focused on Faulkner, including “Becoming Faulkner: The Art and Life of William Faulkner,” which won the Hugh Holman Award for the best book of literary scholarship or literary criticism in the field of southern literature published in 2010. In 2015, Weinstein retired from Swarthmore and moved to Martha’s Vineyard full-time. Since then, he’s gone on to write three more books and to continue teaching adults through the Vineyard Haven Library, Swarthmore Lifelong Learning, and the 92nd Street Y in New York.

For more information, please contact the library at vhpl_programs@clamsnet.org or (508) 696-4211.