Wisdom from great writers on every year of life | Joshua Prager

192,333 views ・ 2016-05-12

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I'm turning 44 next month,
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and I have the sense that 44 is going to be a very good year,
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a year of fulfillment, realization.
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I have that sense,
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not because of anything particular in store for me,
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but because I read it would be a good year
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in a 1968 book by Norman Mailer.
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"He felt his own age, forty-four ..."
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wrote Mailer in "The Armies of the Night,"
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"... felt as if he were a solid embodiment
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of bone, muscle, heart, mind, and sentiment to be a man,
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as if he had arrived."
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Yes, I know Mailer wasn't writing about me.
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But I also know that he was;
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for all of us -- you, me, the subject of his book,
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age more or less in step,
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proceed from birth along the same great sequence:
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through the wonders and confinements of childhood;
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the emancipations and frustrations of adolescence;
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the empowerments and millstones of adulthood;
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the recognitions and resignations of old age.
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There are patterns to life,
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and they are shared.
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As Thomas Mann wrote: "It will happen to me as to them."
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We don't simply live these patterns.
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We record them, too.
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We write them down in books, where they become narratives
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that we can then read and recognize.
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Books tell us who we've been,
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who we are, who we will be, too.
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So they have for millennia.
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As James Salter wrote,
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"Life passes into pages if it passes into anything."
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And so six years ago, a thought leapt to mind:
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if life passed into pages, there were, somewhere,
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passages written about every age.
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If I could find them, I could assemble them into a narrative.
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I could assemble them into a life,
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a long life, a hundred-year life,
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the entirety of that same great sequence
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through which the luckiest among us pass.
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I was then 37 years old,
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"an age of discretion," wrote William Trevor.
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I was prone to meditating on time and age.
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An illness in the family and later an injury to me
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had long made clear that growing old could not be assumed.
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And besides, growing old only postponed the inevitable,
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time seeing through what circumstance did not.
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It was all a bit disheartening.
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A list, though, would last.
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To chronicle a life year by vulnerable year
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would be to clasp and to ground what was fleeting,
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would be to provide myself and others a glimpse into the future,
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whether we made it there or not.
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And when I then began to compile my list, I was quickly obsessed,
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searching pages and pages for ages and ages.
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Here we were at every annual step through our first hundred years.
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"Twenty-seven ... a time of sudden revelations,"
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"sixty-two, ... of subtle diminishments."
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I was mindful, of course, that such insights were relative.
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For starters, we now live longer, and so age more slowly.
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Christopher Isherwood used the phrase "the yellow leaf"
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to describe a man at 53,
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only one century after Lord Byron used it to describe himself at 36.
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(Laughter)
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I was mindful, too, that life can swing wildly and unpredictably
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from one year to the next,
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and that people may experience the same age differently.
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But even so, as the list coalesced,
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so, too, on the page, clear as the reflection in the mirror,
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did the life that I had been living:
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finding at 20 that "... one is less and less sure of who one is;"
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emerging at 30 from the "... wasteland of preparation into active life;"
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learning at 40 "... to close softly the doors to rooms
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[I would] not be coming back to."
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There I was.
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Of course, there we all are.
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Milton Glaser, the great graphic designer
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whose beautiful visualizations you see here,
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and who today is 85 --
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all those years "... a ripening and an apotheosis," wrote Nabokov --
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noted to me that, like art and like color,
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literature helps us to remember what we've experienced.
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And indeed, when I shared the list with my grandfather,
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he nodded in recognition.
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He was then 95 and soon to die,
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which, wrote Roberto Bolaño,
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"... is the same as never dying."
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And looking back, he said to me that, yes,
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Proust was right that at 22, we are sure we will not die,
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just as a thanatologist named Edwin Shneidman was right
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that at 90, we are sure we will.
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It had happened to him,
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as to them.
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Now the list is done:
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a hundred years.
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And looking back over it,
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I know that I am not done.
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I still have my life to live,
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still have many more pages to pass into.
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And mindful of Mailer,
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I await 44.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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