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In the Fourth Quarter
Graeme Hunter on Making the Grades in Longevity & Life
Seventy-five! In the days before grade inflation, that was a significant number. Teachers were slow to bestow it. Students were therefore thrilled to receive it. Seventy-five was the point of entry into the B range. Receiving that mark was something like arriving in the upper middle class. We were not aristocrats but we could sometimes rub shoulders with them on an almost equal footing. We fell short of genius, but we had a mark we could be proud of, and we could dream of someday achieving an A.
Something analogous is true when we turn 75. We have escaped fatal birth defects, germs, viruses, accidents, acts of violence, wars, and other evils that lurk on the byways of death. And having exercised this skill for so long awakens in us the hope of getting an A in longevity.
It happens. As it did in a true story I wrote about in 2019 ("A Case of Win-Win," July/August): A French widow of 90 made an attractive offer to a lawyer of 47. He was to give her 2,500 francs a month until her death, in exchange for which she would bequeath to him her fashionable flat in Arles. He accepted.
The lawyer bet on one probability but overlooked another. It is probable that a woman of 90 has not long to live, but it is also probable that some people who achieve an A in the discipline of living may go on to achieve an A+. A woman who has already lived 90 years may keep right on living. As indeed happened in this case. Jeanne Calment lived to be the oldest person in the world, dying at 122 in 1997, outlasting the lawyer by about one year.
A Dubious Blessing?
So reaching 75 is as promising an achievement as receiving a mark of 75 used to be. And those who reach such an age can take its promise to their comfort. But how good is either promise?
People who achieve a mark of 75 and then rise to an A in their disciplines often waste their eyes, their strength, their years, and ultimately their lives, in those same disciplines, for the sake of offering the world their fussy expertise in matters of great subtlety, but small importance.
Similarly, may not even the rarely attained A+ in longevity be a dubious blessing? Poets know this. Here is what Ben Jonson says about it:
"The Noble Nature"
It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make man better be;
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:
A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May,
Although it fall and die that night—
It was the plant and flower of Light.
In small proportions we just beauties see;
And in short measures life may perfect be.
Graeme Hunter is a contributing editor to Touchstone and Research Professor of Philosophy at Dominican University College in Ottawa. He is the author of Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought (Ashgate).
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