Changing Worlds and the Ageing Subject: Dimensions in the Study of Ageing and Later Life Book

This book is ABSURD.

Absurd topic; absurd approach; absurd depth and complexity. Under the command of an ABSURDLY nimble intellect. All 311 of these bizarre and almost pointless pages hold together because, above all, The Kingdom of Infinite Space is ABSURDLY WELL WRITTEN.

The book is just a description of your head. No really. Your *physical* head. Between philosophical interludes, it's about secretions, language, kissing, blushing, coughing and other "head winds," empty space, pain and the sense of self within the head. The subject is inherently "boring," as the first philosophical chapter well admits, noting that the head itself usually resides outside our active awareness, except insofar as it houses the sense of self.

But for those in possession of a head, it's a great read. Tallis takes the mundane and proceeds to "heighten, not allay, astonishment and a sense of mystery" (p xv). Which is what poets do. But a phenomenologist medical doctor with a penchant for smart mags and theatre? This one, yes. His prose channels awe.

The cover blurb says "proudly humanistic," but actually his mind is better than that. He sails between the Scylla of scientific materialism and the Charybdis of poetic woo-woo subjectivity. He's not a humanist but a damn fine phenomenologist, whose work is entirely grounded in the experience of experience. All that we have is what we experience. Philosophers and social researchers who claim to come from Husserl forget this every ten minutes, but Tallis is immaculate: there is not a single sentence in this book where he falls into philosophical abstraction, on the one hand, OR scientific dogma on the other.

The guy is comfortable with contradiction in the extreme, but even more excellent: he is comfortable not having much of a theory. Anyone who thinks they care about phenomenological PRACTICE - philosophers, ethnographers, anthropologists -would do well to dwell in his mindstream. His under-the-hood phenomenology is a beautiful, silent machine, drawing easily on the whole of the modern western tradition with - astonishingly - no showboating or pretention. He has an agenda-free, practical, working command of the ideas that matter in western philosophy that recalls Bertrand Russell and David Hume, but unlike his countrymen isn't even biased by the analytical point of view and the sense of intellectual superiority it suffers.

The occasional chapters on metaphysics are some of the LEAST bullshit philosophy I have ever read. Tallis is comfortably at home in the western canon of meta-ideas, and can put it all in his own (sharp, funny, economical) terms. If you can slow down this easy read enough to absorb what he's really doing in the philosophical chapters, you'll get an education almost without noticing it.

All this clarity enables Tallis to see through basically all ideological nonsense. For example, here he is, years before anyone else could articulate a critique of the mind-to-brain reductionism of early neuroscience, hammering away at studies of the head that claim cognition comes only from the brain. Characteristically, he generates a cute term for the fallacy - "neuromyth."

More on Tallis as a writer:

This book is so well written that I have to backtrack over certain clever sentences to see if he's writing right. Of course he is: he's writing SO right as to call attention to little absurdities in our language and in our minds. "All faces are to some degree poker." (p. 105).

It is so well written my face HURT from my head's natural expressive responses - that is, the internal generation of "head winds" in the form of guffaws and chortles -to the first few pages.

So well written that I had to read with a pencil, like I haven't done since grad school, just to talk back to Tallis in the margins. Though I ended up filling that space not with my usual comparisons and counterpoints... but with emoticons.

Elsewhere the language is just too damn beautiful. Here he is on the voice: (p 96) "And those words are realized in a voice that is unique to ourselves: 'the voice lies at the heart of what it is to be human.' The tone and timbre, the music and dissonance, of the voice seem to give a hit of what it is like 'in there'. The 'grain of the voice' market an intersection between the body, with its unique trajectory through the world, and the community of minds to which human beings also belong. The girl with the evening tones in her deep voice, the penetrating mosquito whine of the resentful cockney, the Archbishop in whose throat syrup trickles over very smooth, very round pebbles: these voices broadcast the ambience of the country of the self from which they hail."

Finally the book is so well written it's actually annoying. The whole section on "normative panting" and "gelastic epidemics" - that is, laughter of the contagious sort, is so adorable I'd half-forget the subject matter itself is fascinating. Tallis is a (self-described) crusty old English doctor of geriatric medicine for godsakes - but there is no straight talk here, and no dry humor. The overt cleverness and artistry throughout CAN be a bit much.

At first I had difficulty discerning if I'm just newly fascinated by Tallis for the good looks of his prose, or if I'm actually responding to the substance of his character. I am a 19th century kind of reader in this sense - what I really care about in an author is whether I admire the mind that generates the perspectives. So the question is whether the pretty language here is a distraction.

As it turns out, I'm pretty sure his mind is as good or better than his mettle. The man is grounded in facts, not just a nice conceptual apparatus, and he's - again - a doctor of geriatric medicine for godsakes. He does the good work of making us think about things we'd rather ignore.

I wonder what other vacuous topics he has made fascinating lately? Oh, it seems that at least three of his recent books are ruminations on death. Everyone's favorite subject, death. I can't wait to read them.

As much as he loves language, Raymond Tallis loves to read, and finds knowledge everywhere. His references are to book reviews and random plays, his data are the most easy to ignore aspects of everyday experience. When it comes to experiencing experience, he's an omnivore's omnivore, and a phenomenologist's phenomenologist. Who knew there existed such a creature.