The Fifth Season

A Journey Into Old Age

In February of 2002, at the age of sixty-one, Jim Levy went to the coast of Oaxaca and tried to kill myself. It was a serious attempt and nearly succeeded. The Fifth Season is a record of that attempt and the next five years of recurring depression and eventual recovery. Levy’s story is not told in a traditional narrative, but consists of nineteen sessions of therapy, journal entries, short essays, vignettes, aphorisms and quotations that address the moods of old age: despair, black humor, hope, nostalgia, joy and revelation.