But death is not necessarily the only or even the primary fact of aging, according to James Hillman. He quotes Spinoza: “A free man thinks of death least of all things.” Instead he writes that a purpose of his book, The Force of Character, is to “decouple death from aging, and instead restore the ancient link between older age and the uniqueness of character.”

“To the question ‘Why am I old?’ the usual answer is ‘Because I am becoming dead.’ But the facts show that I reveal more character as I age, not more death…Far more important to look at older years as a state of being, and ‘old’ as an archetypal phenomenon with its own myths and meanings. That’s the bolder challenge: to find the value in aging without borrowing that value from the metaphysics and theologies of death. Aging itself, a thing of its own, freed from the corpse.”

Hillman was 73 when he published this book--well into his own Act III. He’s 80 now, and has published what he said was his last book in 2005. As the virtual inventor of archetypal psychology, and former director of the Jung Institute, Hillman has written about the particular characteristics of youth and age for some 35 years.

In some ways, Hillman reclaims what others deny for Act III. He quotes T.S. Eliot, that “old men ought to be explorers.” “I take this to mean: follow curiosity, inquire into important ideas, risk transgression.” He writes of old age as adventure—an adventure of the mind, of the soul.

Hillman writes approvingly of the other recently published book I consider a guide to Act III for the Boomer generation: Theodore Roszak’s America the Wise (also published in paperback under the title “Longevity Revolution”), which Hillman calls “superb.” Describing the book’s thesis of the power of the Boomer generation to transform aging and the world: “Their sheer numbers could revolutionize society, moving it from predatory capitalism and environmental exploitation to what Roszak calls “the survival of the gentlest.’ The increasing proportion of seniors in the population tips the balance in favor of values that, he believes, seniors hold dearest: alleviation of suffering, nonviolence, justice, nurturing, and maintaining ‘the health and beauty of the planet.’”

But to embark on this adventure, Hillman believes we must begin by “exorcising the morbid idea of aging that keeps older citizens immobilized by depression, narrowed by anger, and alienated from their calling as elders; second, by restoring the idea of character, which strengthens faith in individual uniqueness as an instrumental force affecting what we bring to the planet.”

Hillman is not trying to reclaim youth, but to claim the unique capacities and energies of aging. There is a fierceness to the expressions of aging, he notes. “Why do older people become moralists, sentimentalists and radicals? They chain themselves to threatened trees; they march, they shout. They lecture Walkmaned ears about the moral decline of the West. We old ones are outraged, indignant, ashamed.”

It is partly the positive energies of the cantankerous, and the persistent return to recollections of the past. It is also the ability to find patterns over time, through having lived those times. We are the embodied memory the young don’t have.

In a three act play, Act III is the resolution as well as the ending. Character is what we’ve been making with our lives. “Character traits include vices and virtues,” Hillman writes. “They do not define character. Character defines them.” Character is our uniqueness, as we express it and as it is seen in the world. “Character is presentational.”

Character is what we are (the “acorn” of our destiny he wrote about in his previous book, The Soul’s Code) plus what our lives have made. The vicissitudes of aging reveal our essential nature. But it is not completely finished—we finish it with aging, and for Hillman aging is also an activity, a kind of art.