Concentrating the Mind

In my last post I presented my life expectancy according to various indices.  These ranged from a 50% chance of living another ten years to only a 4%-14% chance of living that long.  The morning after posting that essay, I awoke with a fever and knew almost at once that another bronchitis attack had begun. This is not a death-defying illness.  Indeed bronchitis is literally an intimate if promiscuous bedfellow, visiting me three or four times a year.  But its appearance so soon after my post about the odds of my reaching given ages reminded me that these indices are not academic exercises.  They deal with my death, which can come at any time.

But perhaps it would be more constructive to say that they also deal with life, for even the most pessimistic of the medical indices gives me a 72%-80% chance of living for at least another four years.  “ Depend upon it, sir,” Boswell reports Johnson as asserting, “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”   The certainty of death in two weeks must concentrate the mind more wonderfully than does the relatively small chance of dying within four years.  But since these odds  are scarcely negligible, I have to ask myself, as I recuperate from this damned bronchitis attack, how I want to spend the time that is left, whether it's ten years, five years, or for that matter two weeks. 

In June we’re scheduled to travel to Alaska to attend the festivities surrounding the celebration of the 41^st anniversary of a good friend’s 39^th birthday and the 60^th anniversary she and her husband will be observing.  And in July we hope to travel to Jerusalem to see old friends and to visit once again our familiar haunts.  We have no more major travel plans after that.  And to tell the truth, I think I’ve seen enough of the world already.  If I never watch the penguins on an Antarctic iceberg or observe Carnaval in Rio, I won’t feel that my life has been wasted.  The same can be said for writing another book. 

What comes to mind, when I consider what to accomplish during this last stage of my life, is similar to what I proposed twenty years ago, as I was lying on an Aegean beach following an operation to remove a colon cancer.  The first aim was the maintenance and if possible the strengthening of my relationships with family and friends.  That aim remains the same.   I will continue to do my best to listen to my family and friends and not to take them for granted.  They require conscious and continuous attention.  The second goal was the enjoyment of music, art, and literature.  Experience has taught me that this was a pious wish, and that in fact reading is more important to me.  I will do my best, when I read for pleasure, to confine myself as much as possible to great literature.  This may mean that I won’t have read most of the current best sellers, but ars longa vita brevis, and besides, truth to tell, few of the current best-sellers have given me more than moderate enjoyment.

Twenty years I also set a third goal, which was to find out what else I could do outside the academy.  If I haven't found out by now, it's not likely that I ever will.  However, I've replaced it with another goal, and that's to continue writing this blog, this personal account of the ups and downs of aging, for as long as possible.


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