We asked: “What book would you describe as beautiful?”
Barbara Brown Taylor: Henri Nouwen required Florida Scott-Maxwell’s The Measure of My Days for his course on aging at Yale Divinity School in the 1970s. I was in my twenties. The book was in its fifth printing, written by an octogenarian who had been an actor, a playwright, a mother, a suffragette, and a Jungian analyst before settling down to write a memoir about being old. “Age puzzles me,” she wrote. “I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting, and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age. To my own surprise I burst out with hot conviction.”
For that reason, she continued, it had become necessary for her to pretend more tranquility than she felt. Her family needed her to be brave and content so they did not have to worry about her. “The old must often try to be silent, if it is within their power,” she wrote, “since silence may be like space, the intensely alive something that contains all.”
