Ageing and the Attainment of Form in Robinson Crusoe

In the initial lines of “Sailing to Byzantium” (Ll. 1-10) William Butler Yeats opposes youth – as a time of existential plenitude and full immersion in the joys of carnality and sense – to the irresistible physical decay brought about by the process of growing old. An awareness of this spoliation, however, does not necessarily entail only loss and despair. For the gradual ebbing away of corporal faculties leaves increasing ground for the intellectual and spiritual progresses of the “soul” (L. 11), to the point where it becomes possible to imagine a final metamorphosis of the passionate and transient living body into a detached and eternal artistic masterpiece graced with an absolute perfection of form. Thus, paradoxically, ageing may turn into an aesthetic experience. And there are cases in which, instead of positing the antithetical nature of the two terms involved – ‘life’ and ‘art’ – in its definitively lifting the individual him/herself out of the pathway of the former up to the sanctuary of the latter, such an experience results in reducing or denying the opposition by directly transfiguring one of the terms into the other: converting the whole existential itinerary that has produced the now-aged individual into an aesthetically and intellectually gratifying object. Any creative product invested with an aesthetic function – as well as art in general, including literature – may be regarded as an attempt to impose