Old Age, Helen M. Luke

Old Age, Helen M. Luke

These five closely related essays by Helen M. Luke view "growing old" as a time of indeed growing into old age, a journey of discovery and new challenges as the Self moves towards completion and wholeness.

If one avoids the pitfalls of anger, denial and despair, old age can become a time of renewal through suffering, in the true sense of the word as a "carrying" or a "bearing up" under difficulties, not being pushed down or depressed by them.

In presenting her thesis, Luke gives insightful and original readings of passages from four literary classics:. Odysseus' being foretold by Teiresias that he has a final, inland journey to make at the end of his life in The Odyssey; Lear's "let's away to prison" speech to his daughter Cordelia near the end of King Lear, Prospero's freeing of the spirit Ariel and bidding farewell to the audience in The Tempest; and a section from the concluding poem in T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets.

In this section about "Little Gidding," Luke points out that T.S. Eliot "defines, in words that pierce to the heart of the darkness of aging, the kind of experiences out of which the purging fire may bring us to the forgiveness, the Mercy, the 'acausal orderdness' (Jung's phrase) of the dance of creation."

Helen M. Luke was born in 1904 in England. She received a Masters degree in French and Italian literature from Somerville College, Oxford. Twenty years later, she became interested in the work of C.G. Jung, and studied his thought in Zurich and London. Arriving in the United States in 1949, she established a practice as a counselor in Los Angeles. In 1962, she founded the Apple Farm Community near Three Rivers, Michigan. Today her work continues both at Apple Farm, which has been described as a "center for people seeking to discover and appropriate the transforming power of symbols in their lives" and as a "women's contemplative community," and through her writings.

Crossroad has published three collections of her essays, including Woman: Earth and Spirit, The Inner Story and The Voice Within. Several articles by Luke have appeared in PARABOLA, The Quarterly Magazine of Myth and Tradition, and she has been interviewed twice in that publication.

• Hardcover with dust jacket (fair) 
• ISBN: 0930407040
• Condition: Very Good 
  
• Publisher: Parabola Books