Living Too Long

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60 Minutes recently ran a story on Reversatrol, the latest snake oil promising perpetual youth. (if you act now you will receive cancer inhibitors as well.) Pharmaceuticals are eagerly experimenting with this natural substance hoping to put life-everlasting into a pill. So far the scientists have only been able to extend life in yeast, but, hey, that’s a start. Reversatrol is currently available in red wine, and the same supposed therapeutic advantage can be obtained now if you drink hundreds of gallons a day. Sounds like a plan to me, but then, what’s the point of living forever falling-down drunk?

When I was a lad the thought of eternal life was somewhat appealing. I even entertained the thought, hardly original, that if I could find a way to travel east really, really fast I could cross the International Date Line every, say, fifteen minutes and thus move back in time. Duh. Now that I am old and can look back on years of observing human behavior I think I’d rather be traveling west. You were right Mr. Greeley.

I’m sure most people would argue that they don’t want to live forever, they only desire a comfortable old age free of the nasties that begin to afflict us at about age fifty and eventually carry us off. I’m not sure I buy that. Why face lifts; why Botox; why liposuction? What do these do to protect against disease?

Others, patiently awaiting Reversatrol, rationalize that one becomes wiser and less impulsive with age. Alas, this too is a crock. T. S. Eliot puts it succinctly in East Coker : “What was to be the value of the long looked forward to, long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity, and the wisdom of old age? Had they deceived us or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders, bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit? The serenity only a deliberate hebetude, the wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets useless in the darkness into which they peered or from which they turned their eyes….Do not let me hear of the wisdom of old men but rather of their folly.” I sometimes tease that there is not greater insult you can pay an elder than to comment, “his/her mind is as sharp as it ever was.”

Please let’s not find more ways of keeping us alive. Enough already; I have a recurring nightmare of Midcoast, Maine evolving into villages of nursing homes and retirement communities, and I see it happening. Florida North, despite the climate. And despite the declining birth rate there are more and more of us, because we all last so long. More hominoids is not good for the planet.

At the end of the seventeenth century there were about a half billion people on earth. There are now thirteen times that many and we are expected to top seven billion in a few years. I read the article on extinction in the May 25 New Yorker. What the two legged mammals have and are doing to the natural world is not pretty. There have been five massive extinctions that we know of in the past. These were cataclysmic, e.g. the Yucatan asteroid. We are currently, apparently, in the early stages of number six. But whereas the others were sudden and recovery could begin at once, the current situation is different. Andrew Knoll, a paleontologist, is quoted in the New Yorker article: “Today, it’s not like you have a stress and the crisis is relieved and recovery starts. It gets bad and then it keeps being bad, because the stress doesn’t go away. Because the stress is us.” Sounds a bit like Pogo: “We have met the enemy and they are us.”

I guess I don’t hope for another asteroid, and I guess I do hope that Darwin was wrong when he expressed: “So profound our ignorance and so high out presumption..” in defending his theory. But let us at least forget about Resveratrol, except perhaps in small doses with a good dinner.