Long for This World

by Jonathan Weiner

  But Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey was fast asleep.

  PART III

  THE GOOD LIFE

  So teach us to number our days,

  That we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

  —PSALM 90

  Chapter 10

  LONG FOR THIS WORLD

  Mortality is at our core. We are long for this world, compared with life in the microcosm of the paramecium, the bacterium, or the Tokophrya standing on the pillar of its holdfast. We have a greater portion of time than most of the other living things with which we share this planet. And yet how we long for this world, how we wish we had more years to explore and enjoy it! How sharply we feel, at every moment of our lives, that mortality is deeply ingrained within us!

  “To be a philosopher is to learn how to die,” said Montaigne. But as a thinker during the Renaissance, he didn’t have much time to learn to do it. He wrote in his tower, in his final essay, “Experience,”

  “I have recently passed six years beyond the age of fifty, which some nations, not without cause, have prescribed as such a proper limit of life that they allowed no one to exceed it. Yet I still have flashes of recovery.”

  I’m glad we live at a time when a writer who has just turned fifty-six is not all that old. (Flashes of decrepitude here, but still young enough to go forward, I hope.)

  “Write as if you were dying,” Annie Dillard advises in her book The Writing Life. “At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case.”

  And that has always been the case, although now we live in a moment when, as we philosophize and grope toward wisdom, we can wonder just what and how different the term and the sentence may be, and if, and when, and what then.

  From the beginning our philosophers have tried to teach us how to die, and our poets have taught us that to contemplate death is to learn how to live. Seneca wrote, “We must make ready for death before we make ready for life.” “You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round,” said Black Elk, the Oglala Sioux holy man. “The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls; birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours…. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.” Walt Whitman ends his poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” with a paean to “death, death, death, death.”

  I once met Aubrey and Adelaide at the Eagle with my family; he’d offered to take us punting on the Cam. But it rained that day, and we ducked into the Fitzwilliam Museum instead. The glass displays in the museum included one of Isaac Newton’s notebooks and a few of Charles Darwin’s letters. Aubrey strode through the halls of treasures at the same clip and with the same degree of interest with which he’d hurried through Ravenna. He was trying, as always, to recruit my boys to his cause. At one point I stopped at a glass case to read the manuscript of John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” which the poet wrote one morning on Hampstead Heath, a short walk from the house where we were staying in London.

  I have been half in love with easeful death….

  Keats had a year and some months to live when he wrote that line, at the age of twenty-three. He had already lost his brother Tom to tuberculosis, and caught the disease himself. While I leaned over the glass museum case, one of my sons squatted on the floor with his back against the wall, and Aubrey settled down right next to him, urgently explaining his own plans for the engineering of thousand-year lives.

  From the first age to our own, mortality has been the theme of writers, including the writers who loomed like immortals to my generation, the giants whose very names can still make us feel as small and hopeless as epigones, even though they are all going now or gone, after all that jockeying for immortality. Norman Mailer wrote about WASPS: “They had divorced themselves from odor in order to dominate time, and thereby see if they were able to deliver themselves from death.” Saul Bellow took John Cheever to the Russian baths in Chicago. “Wreathed in vapor he looked more immortal than I,” Cheever reported in a letter to his brother, “but I think he was trying.” “God save us from ever ending, though billions have,” John Updike wrote in his last cycle of poems, Endpoint, when he was dying of cancer at Massachusetts General Hospital.

  Mortality, impermanence, ephemerality: this has been the great theme of modern science, too. Galileo’s discovery of sunspots ran counter to traditional astronomy and its view of the sun as immortal. People had always thought the sun was perfect, eternal, and spotless; he argued that the sun could be mortal and decay—like the rest of us. “It proves nothing to say…that it is unbelievable for the dark spots to exist in the sun because the sun is a most lucid body,” Galileo wrote impatiently. “So long as men were in fact obliged to call the sun ‘most pure and most lucid,’ no shadows or impurities whatever had been perceived in it; but now it shows itself to us as partly impure and spotty, why should we not call it ‘spotted and not pure’? For names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.”

  Galileo saw ruin not only in the sun but also in the moon, when he pointed his telescope there. And he much preferred a cosmos in motion and even in decay to a cosmos that, once created, never changed:

  I cannot hear it to be attributed to natural bodies, for a great honour and perfection that they are impassible, immutable, inalterable, &c…. It is my opinion that the Earth is very noble and admirable, by reason of so many and so different alterations, mutations, generations, &c. which are incessantly made therein; and if without being subject to any alteration, it had been all one vast heap of sand, or a masse of Jasper…wherein nothing had ever grown, altered, or changed, I should have esteemed it a lump of no benefit to the World, full of idlenesse, and in a word superfluous, and as if it had never been in nature; and should make the same difference in it, as between a living and a dead creature: The like I say of the Moon, Jupiter, and all other Globes of the World.

  And this has been the drift of science ever since, in the discovery of the deep geological layers of the earth, and the vast numbers of species that have gone extinct, to be preserved only within those layers; and in the lives and deaths of the stars; and in the cycle of the life and death of the universe itself—all of which those sunspots prefigured.

  If anything, the cosmos of science is as ephemeral as the cosmos of Buddha, who founded a religion on evanescence, as on a rock. Siddhrtha Gautama, who became the Buddha, wearying when very young of the sights and dread of mortality, shocked by his first sight of an old man by the side of the road, left Lumbini on a pilgrimage into the mountains:

  “Grieve not for me,” he said, “but mourn for those who stay behind, bound by longings to which the fruit is sorrow…for what confidence have we in life when death is ever at hand?…Even were I to return to my kindred by reason of affection, yet we should be divided in the end by death. The meeting and parting of living things is as when clouds having come together drift apart again, or as when the leaves are parted from the trees. There is nothing we may call our own in a union that is but a dream.”

  Mortality is the central fact of our lives. Contrary to rumor, we do know it even when we are young. We are adept at pushing the thought away, but it is there with us almost from the beginning. There are times in every life when we find it hard to think about and impossible to withdraw from. We try to number our days, so that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom, as we are advised in the Psalms. And it is essential to us at any age to know or to guess roughly where we are in our time—because that knowledge does teach us how to live. Laura L. Carstensen, a psychologist at Stanford, has presented an interesting pap
er in Science, “The Influence of a Sense of Time on Human Development.” When we have reason to believe that we have decades ahead of us—our whole life ahead of us, as we say—we focus our energies on adventures, new experiences, learning new things: the advancement of learning. When we believe that we have very little time left, we focus more on experiences that have emotional meaning for us; the meaning we have found and made.

  For Carstensen and her colleagues, this helps make sense of what psychologists have sometimes called the “paradox of aging.” Older people tend to want to spend their time within a small social circle of a few close friends and loved ones. They want to focus their time and energy where they have already found their greatest satisfaction. And though their world is smaller, they often say they are as happy as young people, if not happier.

  Ask old people how they want to spend time, and almost always that is what they say: they want to spend it with their loved ones. Young people asked the same questions will choose to spend time on new experiences. In one test, Carstensen showed people a travel poster with the usual spread of photographs: a cheetah, a parrot, a family picnicking on a trip, the Sphinx. One poster carried the message, “Capture those special moments.” The other poster read, “Capture the unexplored world.” The old people in the study chose to capture those special moments; the young people were more attracted to the unexplored world. “Young or old, when people perceive time as finite,” Carstensen writes, “they attach greater importance to finding emotional meaning and satisfaction from life and invest fewer resources into gathering information and expanding horizons.” And when we see time as virtually infinite, our priorities reverse.

  In one experiment, Carstensen and her colleagues asked their subjects to imagine that their doctor had just called to say that science had made a medical breakthrough, which would give them many more years to live. Now they were willing and eager to spend time with new people and broaden their horizons. But if they were asked to imagine that they would soon leave their homes and move somewhere very far away, most of them said that they would spend their remaining time with a few of the people they were closest to. Young and old had the same reaction. What mattered here was not how old they were, how much time they’d lived, but how much time they thought they had ahead. Carstensen writes, “Preferences long thought to reflect intractable effects of biological or psychological aging appear fluid and malleable.”

  When we’re in the first few ages of man, the last few ages seem very far away. But we do know those last ages are there, and death is there. And it is healthy and adaptive to know that; to number our days, that we may try to be wise; even if we are adept a moment later at pushing the thought away.

  When we arrive at the late ages we are still consumed with the problem of mortality and still adept at pushing it away. In fact, when we’re old (having arrived at that state as if suddenly), mortality means so much to us that it might crowd out everything else, if we weren’t so good at thinking about it and then trying to ignore it again. An old New Yorker cartoon shows a man of a certain age reading the obituaries and thinking: Twelve years older than me…. Five years older than me…. My God, exactly my age…. People have computed that way since the days of the first newspapers, sometimes with a frisson of fear, but often with a strange feeling of comfort afterward. As Dr. Johnson observes, “The computer refers none of his calculations to his own tenure, but persists, in contempt of probability, to foretell old age to himself, and believes that he is marked out to reach the utmost verge of human existence, and see thousands and ten thousands fall into the grave.”

  From beginning to end it is this knowledge of the limit, the endpoint, death, that looms largest in our calculations and our struggles, and touches us most deeply in the stories of the struggles of our heroes. At the Eagle, patrons often wander under the blood-red ceiling of the RAF Room and read the initials of the pilots, the nicknames of their squadrons and commanders. “Donald Jimmie Moore.” “Bert’s Boys.” “The Pressure Boys.” You can make out the form of a woman who floats across the ceiling like a constellation. She is remembered in the pub as Ethel. She may have been the land-lady’s sister. Apparently the young airmen lifted her up to the ceiling one night and drew her outline in lipstick, and apparently she had lost her clothes.

  The young airmen wrote up there with their lighters, with that lipstick, with candles, and with charcoal from the fireplace.

  “Alis Nocturnes,” a motto: “On the Wings of the Night.”

  “58.” The Fifty-eighth squadron was commanded by Sir Arthur Travers Harris, known as “Bomber” Harris to the press and as “Butcher” Harris to his men. The men were as young as seventeen, but they knew.

  In what is now the Eagle’s DNA Room, James Watson was oppressed by a sense of his own mortality. Watson was convinced that great scientists achieve breakthroughs by the age of twenty-five, and he barely made it. Soon after his eureka moment with Crick, and their victory lunch, Watson made his way to Paris, where he did not have much luck finding girls, in spite of his bohemian long hair and sneakers. He ends The Double Helix on a melancholy note, staring at the girls near Saint-Germain-des-Prés: “I was twenty-five and too old to be unusual.”

  Among the innumerable things it does to us, mortality binds us in mutual piety, when we’re young, like those pilots. The problem of mortality pushes us to choose a path; it goads us to accomplish something, like Watson and Crick. We push it away with all of the missions that fill the first ages of man, but we know the problem is there, and it goads us to ask the largest questions—questions of ultimate meaning; questions we might never think to ask if we had all the time in the world.

  This problem of mortality will define our next years and decades. It will involve not only writers, philosophers, and biologists but also sociologists, economists, and politicians. It will weigh on our minds at least as much as at any time in history, with or without the discovery of an elixir of youth. Because of our success on the planet, we face a new era even without the elixir.

  “Very long lives are not the distant privilege of remote future generations,” according to an analysis by the Danish gerontologist Kaare Christensen and colleagues; “very long lives are the probable destiny of most people alive now in developed countries.” Life expectancy has been rising on a straight line for more than 165 years. This linear progress “does not suggest a looming limit to human life span,” they argue. “If life expectancy were approaching a limit, some deceleration of progress would probably occur. Continued progress in the longest-living populations suggests that we are not close to a limit, and further rise in life expectancy seems likely.”

  Life expectancy has doubled over the past two hundred years, and in the last half century most of that rise came from improvements in the lives of the old, whereas before, it had come from improvements for the young. The number of centenarians on the planet has more or less doubled with every decade since 1960. At the moment, Japan is the country that offers the most years of life to its citizens. In 1950 a woman in Japan who had just reached age 65 could expect to live another thirteen years. Fifty years later, a Japanese woman who reached age 65 could expect another twenty-two years. In 1950, her chance of reaching age 100 was less than one in a thousand. By 2002, her chance was one in twenty.

  According to Christensen, the elderly in Denmark are living longer without spending more years sick, frail, and in pain. A recent study followed more than two thousand elderly Danes. Between ages 92 and 100, the number of those who could live independently, shopping, cooking, and bathing, declined only slightly, from 39 percent to 33 percent. Even at age 100, one in three Danes was still independent. That’s pleasant news for warm, fallible human computers of a certain age (although it’s not quite as comforting as it sounds, because most of those 92-year-olds never made it to 100).

  These forecasts could be wrong. The long rise in life expectancy through history has been broken here and there, chipped into jagged and serrated edges like a flint knife, inte
rrupted by the great wars, famines, and epidemics. In the fourteenth century the Great Plague killed nearly half the population of Europe. Baby boomers have to look only one generation back to remember the global cataclysm that brought them into the world. More than 50 million people died in World War Two. Russian men died in such numbers during the war that there was a shortage of able-bodied males in the Soviet Union for a whole generation. Lately the life expectancy of Russian men has been declining again, because of too little work, too little food and medicine, and too much vodka and tobacco.

  S. Jay Olshansky, a well-respected demographer at the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois in Chicago, thinks we’re already at the limit of human life expectancy. He believes that we are not likely to extend it beyond about eighty-five years. He warns that in the United States, average life expectancy may soon begin to decline, as in Russia, because of too many burgers and fries.

  More optimistic demographers point out that Olshansky has been wrong before. In 1990, he predicted that life expectancy at age fifty would not exceed thirty-five years “unless major breakthroughs occur in controlling the fundamental rate of aging.” As things turned out, Japanese women were already exceeding this life expectancy by 1996.

  The implications of these changes for the world’s economies are very mixed. In Italy and Spain today there are now almost twice as many old people as young people. With so many old and so few young, those countries and many others may be in for hard times during the next few decades. As one population expert in Washington has put it, you can’t keep going with the pyramid of civilization standing on its vertex. You can’t run a village, much less a country, if most of your people are in nursing homes. Chekhov wrote a short story about a coffin-maker that begins, “The town was small, worse than a village, and in it lived almost none but old people, who died so rarely it was even annoying. And in the hospital and jail there was very little demand for coffins. In short, business was bad.”