ABSTRACT
La Vieillesse, Simone de Beauvoir's work on old age, covers a vast span in time and geography. Often the old become depressed by the attitudes of strangers or casual acquaintances: they become invisible. Some genial souls might smile at the old, but as they would smile at a friendly dog. The old are frightening because they wear the mark of death. The invisibility of the old is shadowed in the young by their instinctive awareness that the old speak a different language and have different ways of thought. They hear another music. An overwhelming fact of old age is the knowledge that now the future no longer exists. It is a conviction having nothing to do with optimism or pessimism. The disparity, and the writer's despair, at the vast distances between Shakespearian poetic truths and the attempt to elicit some truths about twenty-first-century old age are obvious, yet the effort is to show that one genre illuminates the other.
