history is filled with stories of
extraordinary figures
who died tragically young
john keats emily bronte alexander the
great
mozart sylvia plath van gogh
in the death of jericho the brilliant
romantic
artist who a few years before had won
international renown for his raft of the
medusa
is shown stretched out on his bed in his
parisian studio
in the redemption having just succumbed
to a typhoid infection
developed after a riding accident he was
33 years old given the extent of their
contributions
it seems appalling how young these
talents died
but when we zero in on the oft remarked
detail
that they seem to have achieved more in
a few brief years
than many of us achieve in eight decades
a new thought opens up the very
discrepancy between
us and them suggests that we are perhaps
being overly blunt
when we choose to measure lifespan in a
unitary way
without reference to what someone
happens to be doing
with the years that they've been
allotted a year in the hands of a person
who is open to experience who creates
feels loves connects and delights
is a lot denser and in that way
therefore
longer than exactly the same amount of
time
in the hands of a less responsive and
less inwardly generous human being
we might go so far as to propose that a
year in the life
of the former should be given a
different numerical weight
than one in the latter that a year in
the life of
say jericho or emily bronte should not
be counted in exactly the same way
as a year for someone else and might
more rightly be
doubled or more we know in travel
that two days in a particularly vibrant
city can feel like a year
in another less inspired place and the
same is true of
life more broadly not everyone who is
living
is equally alive just as we calculate
dog years to take animal size and
anatomy into account
so we might recalibrate lifespan
according to the depths of meaning one
has plumbed
not the gross years that one has
breathed
adjusted for the intensity of experience
we might hence judge that
whatever basic chronology might claim
mozart really died at around 120 years
old and
sylvia plath at 80 and jericho in his
mid-70s
all this matters immensely because our
sadness at the idea of death
frequently reduces itself to the thought
that our lives might not be
as we put it long enough but we
shouldn't measure a life by the hours it
contains
rather by the wisdom love and
intelligence
with which these hours have been spent
by which school
many of the people most legendary for
having had brief lives
really had nothing of the sort it
doesn't matter in this if we have no
genius level capacities at poetry or
painting
it still remains for us to choose how
purposefully
and beautifully and therefore ultimately
how long
we can live we should not stay
transfixed
or devastated by the simple number of
days
liable to be ahead of us we should
concentrate
on how to sprinkle them with meaning
in the novel the leopard by giuseppe
tomasi de la pedusa
there's a powerful death scene the
elderly fabrizio corbeira prince of
selena who is the psychological center
of the book
is about to die he's lying in bed with
his weeping relatives around him
and he asks himself the terrifying
fundamental question
how much of my life have i actually
lived the answer is deeply disturbing
he can pick out a few months here and
there two weeks before his wedding
two weeks after a few days around the
birth of his first
son certain hours he spent in his
observatory he's a distinguished
astronomer
a few hours of flirtation here and there
times when he was reading aloud to his
children
conversations with one or two friends
particularly his nephew
but not much in total perhaps a year or
two
out of 70. if we measure the reality of
our lives by the quantity of time
we have passed in a state of genuine
happiness
the answer may be distressing but it
might be the right way
of sizing up the length of a life we
should become far more focused on how
well we live rather than the absolute
number of days we're going to exist
we're not in the end ever really very
short
of time what we're truly short of is
affection open-heartedness kindness
tolerance we're short of the ability to
create peak experiences
in which we are sufficiently
unfrightened approachable and responsive
we may have a lot to mourn but it isn't
necessarily the imminence of death
it may more be the difficulty of living
with courage and sensitivity
the challenge of our lives is to learn
to live deeply
rather than extensively
the artist john isaacs depicts a ravaged
corpse in a gallery
its stomach hangs out its rib cage
appears to have been hacked at like a
butcher's carcass
but the real horror and rebuke lies in
the title of the work
are you still mad at me the tone is
calculatedly banal
next to the ghoulish fate that has
befallen what we take to be
someone's erstwhile partner the poor
corpse before us
might only a little while ago have spent
their time in an apartment
squabbling with their loved one
asserting their point of view
not forgiving not being able to move on
sure they were right but not being able
to see things through another's eyes
and now their pettiness is being judged
from the perspective
of death are we really going to spend
the only lives we'll ever know
in yet another argument about who
disrespected whom
when outside the narrow chasm of our
embittered relationships
so many opportunities for joy and wonder
remain
are we going to walk towards death
without properly filling our lungs with
a beauty of existence
we aren't here being warned that we're
gonna die that's eminently survivable as
a thought
we're being warned of a far more
appalling but less
often mentioned danger that we might die
in the midst of a sulk about
not very much at all none of us can
command how long we live
but it is very much in our remit to try
to adjust
how colorfully and how deeply we're
going to live
we may have to rethink what a premature
death actually is
it isn't necessarily what happens to a
young artist who's gone by thirty
he or she may in a fairer assessment
have been a
nonagenarian or more it's we
who might right now even if we are well
past middle age
be heading for a regrettably early death
so our goal shouldn't be to lay claim to
yet more decades
it is to ensure that we do everything in
the days ahead
to learn the art of appreciation
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