Evanston: life is only forty years long
Evanston: life is only forty years long
I could as easily have called this ‘two views of old age’ but decided to be more provocative.
Some of you have been kind enough to say that I am not old. That someone in their mid- sixties is not old is a delusion that I expect will become increasingly popular as the generation behind me ages. But it is wrong.
While writing the short story, “Last Born”, I did some research and learned that 82% of the world’s population is under age 50.
A hundred years ago life expectancy in the United States for white males was 47 years. (As an aside, the figures trend continually upward with the single exception of 1918, when the influenza epidemic caused a dramatic drop. 1917: 47 years. 1918: 36 years. 1919: 53 years. Today it stands at 73 years, although a white male who reaches 65 has a life expectancy of 82.
But beyond the statistics, is something that I have always known: your life is defined by what you do between roughly age twenty and sixty. Those ages and forty years are arbitrary. You might have forty-five years. You probably don’t have fifty. The world’s work, great art, almost everything, is produced by people older than twenty and younger than sixty. There are exceptions--swimmers and girl gymnasts seem to peak as teen-agers; and someone may occasionally do something of interest after sixty--but they are just that: exceptions.
I say this without regret and as someone who has kept his passion, as well as his waistline, about as well as anyone.
Perhaps that is the key: to live so that when you are old, you don’t regret what you did not attempt when you were younger. For several generations none of the men in my family survived to age forty; I never expected to have much time. Having led a life of sufficient risk that success could be measured in survival, being old is a pleasant surprise.
While Western civilization has been well served by Aristotelian logic with its either/or and excluded middle syllogisms, it is possible without being mystical to hold simultaneously opposing views in one’s mind.
In STORM PASSAGE I wrote about two views of death: Socrates: ‘Why should I fear death: for when I am, death is not; and when death is, I am not?” and Dylan Thomas: “Do not go gentle into that good night...Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
My opposing view of old age is: screw it. I still want what I have always wanted. I still do what I have always done: write, sail and love. My back bothers me some; my memory has more frequent lapses; and my skin has had way too much sun. Tough.
After my ‘Modest Proposal’ appeared on the Sailing Anarchy website, I received an email from a man asking rhetorically if I recalled what happened to Joshua Slocum.
My instant reply: “Yes. He died at sea instead of in a nursing home.”
Wednesday, November 21, 2007