How to Live : A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While they are still on this Earth) by Henry Alford. I don't believe in being old equates to prudence or wisdom but yet it's safe to assume from law of averages that the older folks are at worst marginally wiser than the rest of the crowd.
I was neither elated nor disappointed after reading this - just felt plain empty. There is no Buddha, no Emerson and other quintessential characters of wisdom. It's layman's guide to wisdom from the wisdom of ordinary older folks. Wisdom can neither be quantified nor we can ever have a perfect definition for it. Buddha's of the world are rare commodities and common folks will never be able to emulate them. It's the pragmatic fact of life. We are probably wired to learn from experience (not from history) and only time we even pretend to learn from history is from the people we know in our lives.
I was little overwhelmed by the reams used to chronicle the story of Henry's mom but I guess people do get carried away by their own personal story.
The book didn't live up to expectations of the title but at the end of the day, may be that is what the author wanted to convey. Probably there is no grandiosity in quest for wisdom and it's the life long accumulation of insights, learning for hindsight and passing the torch to the next generation. The trick is to squeeze wisdom out of the sheer mundanity of everyday life. Instead of looking for genes of wisdom it would be more appropriate to create and spread memes of wisdom.
"The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility:humility is endless" - T.S Eliot in Four Quartets.
"It's easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to life after the world's opinion; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with the prefect sweetness the independence of solitude." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"It is hard to live in the world and it is hard to live out of it. It is hard to be one among many" - Buddha
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