Two Men

There is a reason why literary fiction tends to touch love gingerly, if at all. It's difficult to be original, thoughtful and truthful about the said segment of human condition. In the past week however, there have been two  instances,

• Robert Peston's rendition of the British stiff upper lip when he selected his late wife Sian Busby's 'The Cruel Mother' in Radio 4's A Good Read. Mocking one's own vulnerability and being embarrassed about bringing personal suffering to a conversation and yet being honest about it is very moving.
• Marty Ginsburg's letter to his wife Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that was reproduced in The New Yorker's profile of her,

On the question of living

The trouble with modern life, or life in the calorie abundant world with relatively advanced healthcare, is that mortality is left to degeneration. That is, having survived the threats of infant mortality, influenza, childhood diseases, risks of famine, war, maternal mortality, heart disease, many types of cancer and many other major "killers", what most people will be left with is death due to Diabetes, Alzheimer, Osteoporosis and the rest. Ones where managing survival is possibly more difficult than death owing to their irreversability.

When faced with that prospect, what does a reasonable person do? Let's assume one manages to live to be sprightly until 90 and then hits a degenerative disease; simply because for all the advances in healthcare, mankind hasn't yet managed to eliminate death. 

What does a reasonable young person do?

One option is to ignore the inevitability. Another is to keep working on the ways one can mitigate the burden one will impose on the world when one ceases to be of any immediate value -- assuming there is value of some sort to be extended at all. The third, and perhaps the more honest is to question, what will be the difference between now and then? Is there any? Even if there is, is the relative value generated by one's own life worth the costs imposed on society and on the physical world? It must take phenomenal arrogance to answer that question in the affirmative, shouldn't it? As healthcare normalizes life expectancy and its relative quality, whatever that means, the obvious question mankind will ask itself is, why wait?

After all, the earlier uncertainty at least created the illusion of life being interesting.