Middle age, a time when the body is both at a peak and at the beginning of collapse, marks, for many, a period for radical reappraisal of one’s life and way of living. The sense of time running out can lead to a period of dramatic self doubt. In Middle Age, the philosopher Christopher Hamilton explores the moods, emotions and experiences of middle age, seeking to describe and analyse that period of life philosophically. Drawing on the experience of his own epiphanic “mid-life crisis” as well as a range of writers – from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, to Larkin and Eliot – Hamilton presents a thought-provoking and candid analysis of the nature of middle age. In a compelling narrative, Hamilton explores many of the themes of mid life – nostalgia, the loss of one’s youth, the giving up of plans, restlessness, feelings of self-doubt, guilt, regret, loneliness, the search for identity, the sense that life has become boring or has ground to a halt, and the heightened awareness of the compromised nature of life. Yet, although the picture Hamilton paints is bleak, it is not without hope. Middle age is shown to bring its own melancholic wisdom: having gained some distance from a youthful sense of our own importance, it is a time that offers us a position from which we can value the sheer spectacle of life and appreciate its small pleasures. And it is in mid life that, in coming to see the ways in which we are each inadequate, ridiculous, or hopeless, and in realizing the necessity of coming to terms with the kind of person we are, we are able to become more tolerant of ourselves and of those around us. In revealing his own struggle to make sense of the emotions that mid life can bring, Hamilton provides fascinating and uncompromising insights into the essence of middle age, a time when, as Orwell wrote, we all have the face we deserve.

"There is much to provoke the reader's reflections, and a good deal of it is liable to make one feel uncomfortable . . . there is an admirable depth of self-exploration here, a relentless striving for honesty, and the eloquent expression of a sensibility that recognizes not only the crud and filth of human existence, but also its joys and delights."

Source: International Journal of Philosophical Studies