Happy 130th Birthday, Jacob

the Vanishing Point

“Did you know that Jacob was 130 years-old when he uprooted his clan and moved to Egypt?”

“No, I didn’t, but thanks for the information. Seems an old age to be making such a major life change, don’t you think?”

I took a moment to think about moving at age 130. The oldest person I’ve known personally died at 105. She’d moved into a nursing home at 99. Egypt—as far as I know—hadn’t come up for consideration at that comparatively young age.

I’m 77 and the fact that I can go for a week at a time without fretting over my physical health or my wits (others may think that a bit of worry here might be in order) or my financial security, etc., is not enough to allow me to contemplate moving kin and camels to Egypt in, say, 53 years. I’m not alone in this, I think. Nobody in his right mind would move to Egypt these days. Hague, maybe.

There are those who believe that given current strides in biology, healthcare, genetics, etc., we will in the future see longevity reminiscent of Jacob, and Noah, and—hang onto your wheelchair—Methuselah. But such advances probably won’t ever be applied retroactively, so the chance that you or I will be able to move to Egypt at 130, there to enjoy our very-slowly declining years watching our offspring being taken into slavery, well, its a future we shouldn’t bank anything on.

Living long without ever being old, that’s surely what we long for. But surely that elusive thing we call “quality of life” deserves consideration. At the extremes, you can hardly blame someone whose life is a continuous misery for not saying, “Boy! I wish this could go on for 130 years or more!” At the other end, those whose life feels like an unending series of adventures can’t legitimately be chided for wishing it would never end. (I have to wonder if Jacob—when he was a young 110 or so—could still down-hill ski, snorkel, scream at the referee in a lopsided soccer game.)

In a splurge of depression and self-pity, Shakespeare’s Hamlet says basically that we’d all kill ourselves if it weren’t for fear of whatever lies after death: “. . . who would fardels¹ bear,/To grunt and sweat under a weary life,| But that the dread of something after death,/ The undiscover'd country from whose bourn²/ No traveller returns, puzzles the will/ And makes us rather bear those ills we have/ Than fly to others that we know not of?”

A person even older than I said to me recently that our earnest discussions about changing the world for the better were useless; that things don’t change, and, that since we (he and I) were old, we should spend our time and energy preparing for death. I replied that I wasn’t even finished preparing for life yet, thank you very much! I’m pretty sure the advice was coming from someone who’d never read Hamlet, who must have picked up this abysmal pessimism somewhere else. Possibly a contemplation of an upcoming memorial service for a friend in our age-range.

My heroes are people like Abe or Paula, who read voraciously until failing eyesight overcame them: paragons of autodidacticism,³ life long learners. Or people who enroll in university after retirement, not to start a new career but because their curiosity, their imaginations have never been put out to pasture. Or Grandma Moses. Or people who move house to another country at 130. 

Thanks, Jacob. Your 130 makes my 77 feel like adolescence! 

1Fardel: a burden. Think a backpack full of bricks as metaphor for a burdensome life.

2Bourne: border, margin. In this case, a border you only cross once.

3Autodidacticism: self teaching