Growing older in public

Growing older is one thing. Growing older in front of people who knew you at twenty-five is another, and it is a situation very few professions impose.

What makes the subject instructive is that the images exist. You can compare, over thirty or forty years, what different strategies produce — something impossible for everyone else.

Two trajectories, quite distinct

The first consists of defending an image. You hold a line, you correct as you go, you keep the gap as small as possible from a reference point located in the past.

This trajectory works for a long time, and it always fails in the same way: through the accumulation of a discrepancy. At some point, the face no longer tells the story of a person; it tells the story of an effort — and the effort is what you read first.

The second consists of letting the face go where it is going, while tending to what nourishes it. This trajectory produces less flattering intermediate images: there are years when you notice the change. Then something settles, and the face at sixty is coherent with the one at thirty — same logic, more fully expressed.

What the second one actually demands

It is often described as letting go, which is both false and unfair.

It is far more demanding than the other. It asks for constancy over decades, a rhythm that is kept, an attention to what is happening beneath — and it offers no quick gratification. There is no moment when you see a result: there is an absence of deterioration, which is invisible by construction.

That is why so few people sustain it. It is not the easy path: it is the path without intermediate reward.

The role of other people’s gaze

It is decisive, and rarely in the right direction.

The gaze measures gaps. It compares to yesterday, to the photograph, to what it remembers. It does not perceive the coherence of a trajectory — that requires distance, and distance only exists in retrospect.

This is what makes the second path so hard to hold: it is poorly rated in real time and well rated at the end. Anyone who has ever held an unpopular position for a long time will recognise the structure.

What this requires you to know

There is a difference between letting a face go where it is going and letting it go just anywhere.

The first requires knowing its own direction — what that particular nature becomes, what it asks for at each decade, what it loses first and what it keeps. Each logic has its own way of moving through time, and they do not resemble one another: one hollows out, another sags, another thins, another becomes more marked.

Without that information, you are not following the second path. You are following the third, which is doing nothing, and it does not produce the same images at all.

A face’s own direction cannot be read on its surface. It is read from the beginning — and it is the only thing that allows you to accompany the passing of time instead of enduring it or fighting it.