Winter Light is a very brave and wise book. In a truly philosophical, expressive, and highly erudite way, it reinvents old age as a time of intense intellectual, emotional, and, yes, corporeal life rather than slow dying.

~ Mark Lipovetsky, Professor of Slavic Languages, Columbia University

Douglas Penick has written a book that is extraordinary in two ways. First, it’s on a taboo subject, the truth of our encroaching senescence. Second, it is about opening, not about closing—about possibilities that somehow arise only in our old age. He kind of sneaks up on us, through the inductive method. Lives, not principles. No instruction offered. Just his lucid writing. And then there we are. Nothing like it.

~ Kidder Smith, Professor Emeritus and former Director of Asian Studies, Bowdoin College

Douglas Penick’s Winter Light is a lucid and uncompromising meditation on aging, and on the astonishment of finding oneself suddenly old, a phenomenon that Penick reads deftly through the work of musicians, painters, and writers who created great art in their later years.

~ Warren F. Motte, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of Colorado Boulder

In this beautiful and intensely moving book Douglas Penick travels across continents, cultures, and centuries to bring us insights into the experience of ageing. These glimpses range from feelings of loss, powerlessness, and isolation to the wonder of discovering a new directness of experience and freedom of creative expression. As our old, accustomed world begins to drop away, as he says in the Foreword, “Other worlds, it seems, are waiting to show themselves.”

~ Francesca Fremantle, translator of The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Winter Light

by Douglas J. Penick

FORTHCOMING Spring 2025

In the contemporary West, the elderly are regarded as somehow “other,” no longer who they used to be, no longer full members of the worlds they once inhabited. Being old is seen as a medical management issue. But old age is not a defective version of what preceded it; it is — like childhood, adolescence, and middle age — its own time of life with its own challenges and gifts. It is an unexpected experience and largely unknown terrain. Winter Light is an exploration of old age as a time when sudden and uncontrollable losses reveal and clarify patterns of existence formerly obscured. In this context, Penick tells of the lives of artists, musicians, and others who, in old age, changed radically to reveal visionary modes of experience.

Near the end of their lives, Titian, Michelangelo, Beethoven, Rabindranath Tagore, Jean Rhys, Andrea Palladio, Paul Cézanne, Leoš Janáček, Stravinsky, and others found unforeseen paths and articulated subtleties and beauties never before encountered. Their visions are now woven into our culture and the stories of their lives are signposts for us. As Thoreau once said: “Not ’til we are lost… not ’til we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”

In five essays, concerned respectively with, body, connection, pattern, loss, and vision, Winter Light explores irretrievable losses and dawning possibilities. Penick gives voice to aspects of the inner life that in old age unfold with unanticipated depth, breadth, strangeness, and light.

About the Author

Douglas Penick’s work has appeared in Tricycle, Descant, New England Review, Parabola, Chicago Quarterly, Agni, Kyoto Journal, Berfrois, Lit Hub, The Utne Reader, Consequences, and Cahiers de l’Herne, among other outlets. He has written texts for operas (Munich Biennale, Santa Fe Opera), and thanks to a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation, three separate episodes from the Gesar of Ling epic. Other publications include the novel Journey of The North Star (Publerati, 2012), a translation (with Charles Ré) of Pascal Quignard’s A Terrace in Rome (Wakefield, 2016), The Age of Waiting (Arrowsmith, 2021), exploring the sensibility of aging amid ecological collapse, and The Oceans of Cruelty (New York Review of Books, 2024), a retelling of an ancient Indian story cycle.