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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 March 2022
The book you are about to read responds to the most important question you could ever ask: What is the meaning of my life? Ricca Edmondson has put together a vast array of resources to help us all respond to this question. She has guided us through the territory, for which we owe her gratitude. Wendell Berry said we live the life we are given, not the life we have planned. In his felicitous phrase, we encounter the question of this book: How do we find meaning in the ‘life we are given’, that is, the actual life we have lived, whether from individual intention or though structures imposed by the world around us? How do we connect the life we are given with ‘the life we have planned’ – that is, with our hopes, ideas, interpretations, and the deep structures of society around us? This question becomes ever-more insistent as we grow older. I write these words a few days before my 70th birthday. I, and we, have less time ahead of us, more time behind us. The plans we had for our future are now replaced by memories of what has happened. With the coming of age, the question of ‘the meaning of life’ is no longer philosophical or hypothetical.
Ricca Edmondson is concerned with illuminating the details of lives-as-given during the last phase of life. Others in gerontology have also been interested in this project, and Edmondson has read and assimilated what they have to say. She is not content with how mainstream gerontology deals with these questions. Formulations like ‘successful ageing’ or ‘life satisfaction’ evidently will not do the job. Edmondson’s approach is an inductive one, recovering the messiness and complexity of lives-lived, reluctant to reduce that complexity to any simple categories. Her approach is a phenomenological one, a hermeneutical one, or choose from among many other terms. The formulations are not important, and each has different methodological claims, such as qualitative research, oral history, ethnography, autobiography and so on. Edmondson draws on all these discursive resources. All are helpful, all are found wanting because we cannot reduce ‘the life we are given’ to methodologies.
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