The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead

by David Shields

  The warning that cigarette smoke contains carbon monoxide occurs in 37 percent of the ads in women’s magazines but occurs in none of the ads in men’s magazines. The advertisements featuring the carbon monoxide warning usually feature youthful, carefree, and less serious-appearing women. Carbon monoxide is a poisonous gas that interferes with the body’s oxygen-carrying mechanisms; advertisers apparently assume that women, especially young women, are less apt than men to know this fact.

  The magazine with the most cigarette advertisements, Mademoiselle, has a young, female audience. Eighty-eight percent of smokers start before age 20, and the only group that smokes more now than it did 20 years ago is adolescent girls.

  Tobacco companies appear to manipulate the use of the Surgeon General’s warning to render them as ineffective as possible, mitigating the purpose of the warning by often using the warning they presume the reader is most likely to ignore.

  Whenever I reread this précis for a poli sci paper Laurie wrote eons ago, I never fail to be moved by her belief/hope that the actions human beings take might be based to any degree whatsoever on rational thought. All the evidence points to the fact that they’re not (cf. anorexia). My father being, of course, the exception: he took up pipe smoking in the early ’50s (in photo-album pictures from that period he looks improbably dignified), but he gave it up immediately after realizing, during a tennis match, that it was cutting down on his wind.

  Sex and Death (ii)

  In many insect species, when the female emerges from her sac as a mature life form, males immediately swarm around her, fighting desperately to mate with her. She mates, then dies after laying her eggs. Instead of the juvenile stages being preliminary to the fully formed adult life form, the adult life form exists only as the culmination of the juvenile life form, as a way for the cycle to continue.

  In animals that produce all their offspring at once, like the salmon, most of the life span is spent getting ready for reproduction. The animal grows, stores energy, and prepares its gonads for one explosion. When the hormonal signal is given, resources are mobilized to maximize reproductive effort, even if this leaves the animal so damaged and depleted that it dies soon after. A salmon’s life span is significantly extended if it’s castrated before its gonads develop.

  As the August mating season nears for the male marsupial mouse, its testosterone levels build steadily higher, reaching a peak in late July. The adrenal glands enlarge, sending elevated levels of hormones into the bloodstream. Males enter a state of extreme physiological excitement and stress. They engage in violent battles with one another for the opportunity to mate with the females. After mating, the males have—in addition to the scars from the battle—stomach ulcers that bleed severely. Their immune systems are so decimated that they easily fall prey to parasites. Nearly all of them will die in the course of the next few days. The females survive to raise and suckle their fatherless young, but they, too, are extremely fragile. Only a few females survive to breed again the following year.

  A boy’s first ejaculations are nocturnal emissions: uncontrolled and unprompted acts. A boy’s body mechanically begins the process of sexual reproduction without much if any input on his part. And it’s fundamentally similar with girls (granting obvious, important differences). Before you are even really used to being alive and moving around in the world, much less have any understanding of yourself, your body’s already starting the reproductive process.

  For most of human history, people mated as teenagers and conceived their first child by age 20. When anthropologist Suzanne Frayser studied 454 traditional cultures, she found that the average age for brides was 12 to 15; for grooms, 18.

  In the last 30 years, the suicide rate has doubled among American children and adolescents; it’s the third leading cause of death in youth. The tumult of hormones is, for some teenagers, too much, e.g., a hugely disproportionate number of school shootings occur in spring.

  Hoop dream (vi):

  My junior year of high school, a month before I broke my leg, while we dressed for our first league game, our coach, Mr. Rossi, stood at the blackboard in the locker room, shaking and crumbling chalk. At first we thought he was just trying to get us psyched up. He stubbed his toe on the bench. We got on our road uniforms and tube socks and assumed maybe Mr. Rossi had had a taste or two too many. Then he burst out with it.

  “Dicky Schroeder,” he said. And we all realized: where the hell was Dicky, home with a head cold when we had Lincoln at Lincoln? Give him a couple of aspirin and send him over there in a cab, right, Mr. Rossi?

  “Dicky had a bad accident in his garage last night. His parents said it wasn’t an accident. Dicky’s not with us any longer.”

  We closed our lockers. It took us a while to grasp what Mr. Rossi said, and it took us the rest of the year for it to sink in. Dicky Schroeder smoked Raleighs and drove a souped-up Chevy. He was always buying new clothes and car accessories and bullshitting you about getting laid. He was too busy to kill himself.

  Around a week later, the school paper ran an obituary, quoting people saying what a solid student he’d been, which was an insult to everyone’s intelligence. The article finished up with a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson saying, “Death isn’t an ending; it’s only a transition,” which did everyone a lot of good, knowing Dicky wasn’t gone forever: he was just running the transition game.

  Immediately after Mr. Rossi told us Dicky had committed suicide, he asked us if we wanted to play the game and, to his surprise and perhaps our own, we all said yes. No one talked on the bus to the game and none of us took warm-ups. Once the game started, we all tried to play like Dicky, looking to pass, working the give-and-go. Everyone was looking for the open man, and the open man was Dicky. We were all hoping to wake up and find out he was only kidding. If we all tried to play like him, maybe he’d pop out from under his garage door and show us how to run the three-on-two. The play I’ll remember until I’m 90 was Brad Gamble, our star, all alone on a breakaway, me trailing. He stopped and set the ball down on the floor for me to pick up. I looked for someone to follow after me; I kept waiting, but no one came. I banked it off the board, and we won in a romp.

  Adulthood and Middle Age

  Decline and Fall (ii)

  If you could live forever in good health at a particular age, what age would you be? As people get older, their ideal age gets higher. For 18-to 24-year-olds, it’s age 27; for 25-to 29-year-olds, it’s 31; for 30-to 39-year-olds, it’s 37; for 40-to 49-year-olds, it’s 40; for 50-to 64-year-olds, it’s 44; and for people over 64, it’s 59.

  Your IQ is highest between ages 18 and 25. Once your brain peaks in size—at age 25—it starts shrinking, losing weight, and filling with fluid. In a letter to his father, Carlyle wrote that his brother, Jack, “decides, as a worthy fellow of twenty always will decide, that mere external rank and convenience are nothing; the dignity of mind is all in all. I argue, as every reasonable man of twenty-eight, that this is poetry in part, which a few years will mix pretty largely with prose.” Goethe said, “Whoever is not famous at twenty-eight must give up any dreams of glory.”

  When I was 31, I was informed that someone had written, in a stall in the women’s bathroom in a bookstore, “David Shields is a great writer and a babe to boot.” This is pretty much the high point of my life, when my acne was long gone and I still had hair and was thin without dieting and could still wear contacts and thought I was going to become famous. (Just recently, looking for compliments, I asked my father what he thought of what I’ve become, and he said, “You were such a great athlete as a kid. I thought sure you were going to be a pro basketball player or baseball player.”) Sir William Osler said, “The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty.” Which is in fact true: creativity peaks in the 30s, then declines rapidly; most creative achievements occur when people are in their 30s. Degas said, “Everyone has talent at twenty-five; the difficulty is to have it at fifty.” The consolation of
the library: when you’re 45, your vocabulary is three times as large as it is at 20. When you’re 60, your brain possesses four times the information that it does at 20.

  Your strength and coordination peak at 19. Your body is the most flexible until age 20; after that, joint function steadily declines. World-class sprinters are almost always in their late teens or early 20s. Your stamina peaks in your late 20s or early 30s; marathon records are invariably held by 25-to 35-year-olds.

  When you’re young, your lungs have a huge reserve capacity; even world-class athletes rarely push their lungs to the limit. But as you age, your lungs get less elastic: you can’t fill them as full or empty them as completely of stale air. Aerobic capacity decreases 1 percent per year between ages 20 and 60.

  “It isn’t sex that causes trouble for young ballplayers,” Casey Stengel said. “It’s staying up all night looking for it.”

  “During the summers of 1938 and ’39,” my father wrote in a piece for his class, “I worked as a keeper of the tennis courts and occasionally as tennis instructor at Chester’s Zunbarg—Sun Hill—a small, 120-capacity resort in the Catskills Mountains 80 miles northeast of New York City. The first day of that first summer, Anne Chester briefed me on the job I was about to step into at her hotel: ‘The salary is small—just $200 for the summer—and I apologize for it, but the fringe benefits more than make up for it.’

  “What fringe benefits?” I asked in my youthful ignorance.

  “It won’t take long for you to find out what they are,” she said, with a sly wink.

  Twenty-four hours later, a sultry brunette walked up to me on the courts and asked if I gave tennis lessons.

  I said I did and asked her what day and time would be convenient for her lesson.

  “And do you give any other lessons besides tennis?” trilled this siren-cum-tennis pupil.

  “Just tennis, lady,” I managed to squeeze out, extending my hand. “The name’s Milt and I’ll see you here tomorrow at 10.”

  “Yes, I know,” she replied, still holding my hand. “I’ll be there.” I thought she’d never let go. I needed that right hand for serving up the ball. “The name’s Eva, Eva Gordon.”

  The next morning, at a few minutes before 10, I was on the courts with a bushel of used tennis balls and a galloping curiosity as to what kind of tennis player this hand-holding Jezebel would turn out to be. 10:15 and no Eva. Was it all a none-too-subtle ploy to meet and size up the new tennis pro? Conventional wisdom has it that tennis teachers are glamorous and sexy guys, though you wouldn’t recognize me from that description.

  Just when I was ready to give up on her, Eva strolled leisurely onto the court, saying, “Here I am, Coach.” She was dressed to the nines in flaming red shorts and a low-cut halter that showed her heart was in the right place.

  “Let’s get started,” I snapped, very businesslike. I had another guest coming for a lesson at 11.

  Eva was a revelation on the courts. She had the smoothest forehand this side of Helen Wills and a backhand that tore the cover off the ball.

  “Do you play for some school?” I asked, signaling a brief time out.

  “Yes, Hunter College in the city,” she replied.

  Eva stayed for two weeks at Chester’s that first time and took a lesson every day. We also played quite a few sets—ahem—off the courts. She was just as good and explosive at that extracurricular activity as she was on the court.

  She returned twice more during the summer for week-long stays and—er—lessons. By Labor Day, we were damned serious, but I had to get back to the city and try to find a job in the heart of the Depression and Eva had to complete her education at Hunter. What’s more, we both knew (we weren’t moonstruck kids) that we’d had a summer fling, one to be treasured, but—for a lot of reasons—not followed up. It was great while it lasted, we both agreed over a tall drink at the hotel bar.

  Arteriosclerosis can begin as early as age 20.

  As you age, your responses to stimuli of all kinds become slower and more inaccurate, especially in more complex tasks. From age 20 to 60, your reaction time to noise slows 20 percent. At 60, you make more errors in verbal learning tasks. At 70, you will experience a decline in your ability to detect small changes, such as the movement of a clock hand.

  Given a list of 24 words, an average 20-year-old remembers 14 of the words, a 40-year-old remembers 11, a 60-year-old remembers 9, and a 70-year-old remembers 7.

  Most people reach skeletal maturity by their early 20s. At 30, you reach peak bone mass. Your bones are as dense and strong as they’ll ever be. Human bones, with their astonishing blend of strength and flexibility, can withstand pressure of about 24,000 pounds per square inch—four times that of reinforced concrete—but if you were to remove the mineral deposits, what you would have left would be flexible enough to tie into knots. In your late 30s, you start losing more bone than you make. At first you lose bone slowly, 1 percent a year. The older you get, the more you lose.

  Beginning in your early 20s, your ability to detect salty or bitter things decreases, as does your ability to identify odors. The amount of ptyalin, an enzyme used to digest starches, in your saliva decreases after age 20. After age 30, your digestive tract displays a decrease in the amount of digestive juices. At 20, in other words, your fluids are fleeing, and by 30, you’re drying up.

  Lauren Bacall said, “When a woman reaches twenty-six in America, she’s on the slide. It’s downhill all the way from then on. It doesn’t give you a tremendous feeling of confidence and well-being.”

  Jimi Hendrix died at age 27, as did Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones of the Stones, Kurt Cobain, and bluesman Robert Johnson.

  Until you’re 30, your grip strength increases; after 40, it declines precipitously. After age 65, your lower arm and back muscle strength declines. Owing to reduced coordination rather than loss of strength, your power output—e.g., your ability to turn a crank over a period of time—falls after age 50. My father, on the other hand, could defeat me in arm-wrestling halfway into his 60s.

  At age 30, men show a decline in enthusiasm for typically masculine activities such as sports, drinking, and car repairs. Be grateful, I say, for small favors. Still, easily one of the happiest moments of my life occurred when, nearly 30 and in grad school, I went with several of my classmates to the gym to play basketball. Out on the wing on a fast break, I caught the ball, reverse-spun on William Mayfield, who started at forward for the University of Iowa basketball team, and beat him to the hoop. (Was he dogging it? Who knows? I don’t want to know.) My fellow grad-student nerds went nuts; they all kept saying, “You don’t even look like a basketball player!” Glasses, love handles, etc. Hoop dream (vii), undoubtedly.

  Nicholas Murray said, “Many people’s tombstones should read, ‘Died at 30. Buried at 60.’” The ancient Persians believed that the first 30 years should be spent living life and the last 40 years should be spent understanding it. Reversing the time periods, Schopenhauer said, “The first forty years of life give us the text; the remaining thirty provide the commentary on it.” According to Rousseau: “Man is always the same: at ten he is led by sweetmeats; at twenty by a mistress; at thirty by pleasure; at forty by ambition; at fifty by avarice; after that, what is left for him to run after but wisdom?” At every age, 10 or 90, my father has been a pleasure-seeking missile.

  Since your vertebral column continues to grow until you’re 30, you might gain anywhere from three to five millimeters in height between ages 20 and 30. Starting at 30, though, you lose one-sixteenth of an inch in height per year; your posture changes because your vertebrae shrink while your hips and knees bend closer to the ground and your foot arch flattens. My father has shrunk from 5'11" to 5'7". As you age, you lose body water and your organs shrink: your body consumes 12 fewer calories per day for each year of age over 30.

  For most people, the ability to hear higher sound frequencies begins to decline in their 30s; men are 3½ times more likely than women to show a decline in their ab
ility to hear high notes. Whatever level of loss is found, it will get, on average, 2½ times worse each decade. The sweat glands that keep the auditory canal moist die off one by one; ear wax becomes drier and crustier, and hard wax builds up to block out sounds. One-third of hearing loss in older people is due to this buildup. Your eardrum becomes thinner and more flaccid, causing the drum to be less easily vibrated by sound waves. You progressively lose your ability to hear sound at all frequencies.

  The limbic system—“the seat of emotions”—exists in a part of the brain, the hippocampus, that humans share with lizards. (Your brain has three layers: the brain stem, controlling basic functions and basic emotions, is the reptilian layer; the mammalian layer houses more complex mental functions such as learning and adaptability; and the third layer constitutes most of the human brain—the cerebral cortex and cerebellum—which allows us to use language and perform complex acts of memory.) Beginning at age 30, parts of the hippocampus die off.

  Emerson said, “After thirty, a man wakes up sad every morning, excepting perhaps five or six, until the day of his death.”

  At 31, Tolstoy said, “At our age, when you have reached, not merely by the process of thought but with your whole being and your whole life, an awareness of the uselessness and impossibility of seeking enjoyment; when you feel that what seemed like torture has become the only substance of life—work and toil—then searchings, anguish, dissatisfaction with yourself, remorse, etc.—the attributes of youth—are inappropriate and useless.”

  Before being guillotined, Camille Desmoulins, one of the leaders of the French Revolution, when asked how old he was (he was 34), said, “I am 33—the age of the good sans-culotte Jesus, an age fatal to revolutionists.”