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  • Time’s Fool #2

About your very own impending personal extinction event. Hearing, sight, sense of smell, balance: diminished. Fingers less dexterous. I can’t thread a needle. Dropping things. But not this subject.

Goethe wrote, “Ein alter Mann ist stets ein Konig Lear”: “An old man is always a King Lear.” True? Lear’s capricious, cruel. Stupid. All old men are like that?

Still, even the lives of not-kings end, and usually with a loss of power, almost always with declining health. Or worse. It’s not just Caliban in The Tempest, whose body with age “uglier grows” and whose mind “cankers.”

Jonathan Swift: “Every Man desires to live long, but no Man would be old.”

Think of “stranded assets,” things devalued, converted to liabilities. Impaired / nonrecoverable / decommissioned. Depleted, nonperforming. Consider the corpus of the self a one-person corporation. Value diminishing. But, but, I have so much invested in being me! So much net worth! Talk about sunk costs! Nonrecoverable.

“You can’t take it with you.”

In 1900, about a decade after Herman Melville’s death at age seventy-two, the New York Times printed a letter from a man who’d known him in his later years. Melville “seemed to me to hold his works in small esteem, and discouraged my attempts to discuss them. ‘You know,’ he would say, ‘more about them than I do. I have forgotten them.’ ”

James Salter wrote, in All That Is, “He was certain of only one thing, whatever was to come was the same for everyone who had ever lived... and—it was difficult to believe—all he had known would go with him.”

Oy vey ist mir, they say in Yiddish. Woe is me. And, of course, “Why me?” [End Page 64]

About my one-and-only self. “Not gettin’ any younger,” as they say. No longer who I was, actually. Economist Richard A. Posner writes, “Aging brings about such large changes in the individual that there may well come a point at which it is more illuminating to think of two or more persons ‘time-sharing’ the same identity than of one person having different preferences, let alone one person having the same preferences, over the entire life cycle.”

Time-sharing! Other selves elbowin’ ”me” out of the way? Not surprisingly, I’ve played an assortment of parts in an already longish life. My poet-mother, gifted performer, termed these her “characterizations” or “leading roles.” Still, psychiatrist Martin Epstein describes “that place inside yourself that hasn’t really changed subjectively... that invisible space where you are who you’ve always been.”

Yes, Dr. E.! But, I’m not myself, lately.

I get that humans are born to die. All creatures that reproduce sexually die, and I’ve been a (determinedly, helplessly) sexual creature. Still, I may have been presuming an exemption from joining those who have “gone to a higher and finer place.”

Poet Paul Smyth: “A minute hooks your lip. Resist? But feel / Death’s line yanked taut, and hear the ticking reel.” But one does resist.

Oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee writes of “the inevitabilities of inertia and decay.” That is, “The standing body will fall down, fall ill. Yet we keep saying, Look, it’s nothing, until we become nothing. It’s as if nature were built to defy the most natural of all laws: that all of us, in the end, will cool, die, diffuse, dissipate.”

All of us dissipating, even the dissipated!

Or, as Villon wrote, “And we were so delightful once! / But this is how it ends for all.” All of them, all of us. Library to which even long overdue books are returned.

We die because, because... because we have lived. “Wait for me,” we kids used to shout. And, when one of us disagreed with something, “It’s your funeral.” And, when not getting all one hoped for, “I can live with it.”

Bone weary. Waking in the middle of the night to pee, I remember singing along with The Animals’ Eric Burdon. “We gotta get outta this place / If it’s the last thing we ever do.” It was 1965, I was twenty, the song soon an anti...

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