Dr. Metablog

O My Papa

We've had two major snowfalls in the last week and the road crews haven't yet found their way to our street. It's a knee-deep icy mess out there. Yesterday one of my neighbors spun himself into quite a hole. He needed a push, so I went outside to help. Even with my professional-grade ice-chopper, I had to bang around for a while and the task took a lot longer than I had expected.  Eventually, I had to resort to the old towel trick to gain enough traction to release the vehicle. My neighbor said, "I'm embarrassed. You shouldn't be doing this."  Which took me aback, of course. I replied, quite spontaneously, "It's exactly what I should be doing." 

And then I recalled one of my father's maxims: "Never omit an opportunity to do a favor for a friend, and never be embarrassed to accept a favor."

The old guy did lots of favors. When someone on East 9 Street had a problem or got into a little trouble, my father acted as consigliere; as far as I know, he never took a nickel for his trouble--though occasionally someone would drop off a compensatory lasagna. In his last years, when he lived alone and his arthritis was very bad, someone mowed his lawn and someone took in his garbage cans and someone raked his leaves.

My father was the least materialistic person that I've encountered in an entire lifetime. He didn't seem to need possessions. No car, no clothes beyond the absolute minimum, no items of personal adornment. He didn't "shop." I was with him once when bought a new hat: "See this. I want another one just like it." We were in and out of the store in two minutes. 

Although he lived in a world of weasels (he was a real-estate lawyer), he was uncontaminated by what went on around him. He'd often tell me stories about the various chicaneries by which people cheated each other--and every time he would express the same astonishment at the fallibility of human nature. He knew of public officials who were on the take, but he preferred to talk about the state legislator who had a large sign on his desk that said, "NO GIFTS."

In one of our very last conversations, I asked him if he himself had ever done anything illegal. He thought for a long time. "I don't know if you'd call this exactly illegal. Do you remember the B-----s?  Rose was a widow and she was dying of cancer, but she didn't know it. She was a teacher with two young children and she had a benefit coming to her from the city. She made a very bad decision--a lump sum instead of an annuity for her children. I went to her school and substituted a new form for the one that she had filed. It was technically a violation and I could have gotten into a lot of trouble." And then he surprised me by quoting some Wordsworth--the lines from Tintern Abbey about the "best portion of a good man's life,/ His little, nameless, unremembered acts/ Of kindness and of love."

It's hard to believe that he's been dead for twenty years now. But I remember him when we come around to the winter solstice (he was born on December 22, 1904)--and he's especially real to me when a neighbor lets me help him extricate his car from a snowbank. 

What We Read in the Fifties: Arrowsmith

Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith, published in 1924 and now hopelessly dated, was a mere thirty years old when we read it in Erasmus Hall High School English classes. I must confess, once again, that I recall almost nothing from my 1950s reading -- just a vague sense that I'd been there before. Nevertheless, the novel wasn't a bad book to present to young people. Dr. Martin Arrowsmith is a dedicated, humorless, idealistic, workaholic scientist who eludes both the snares of commerce and also of love and family in a single-minded pursuit of the knowledge that will save lives. Sinclair Lewis's America is repressive, vulgar, materialistic, and unredeemed. Why not let high schoolers read a book with such a manic, satirical spirit?  It might have done them a world of good -- though I can't vouch that it did anything for me.

Dr. Arrowsmith has no time anything so frivolous as aesthetics -- and it's just as well, for neither does his creator. Arrowsmith is shapeless in form and crude in style. It's a sledgehammer of a book, as unsubtle as America at its worst. 

Query: were we informed that Sinclair Lewis was famous for having said that "when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross?"

Haircuts: A History

When I was a child, haircuts were perpetrated at Joe's Barber Shop on Coney Island Avenue. It was a pleasant place: there were wall-to-wall mirrors on either side of Joe Montuori's shop, and a boy sitting in the chair could lose himself in the infinitely-regressing images. Joe always had a friend or two in the shop with whom he spoke incomprehensible rapid-fire Italian. The haircutting itself was an ordeal. Joe charged 75 cents a head, but my mother had driven a bargain: three haircuts (myself and my two brothers) for $1.80. Joe revenged himself on me by a) working the electric buzzer as rapidly as possible, and b) frequently re-arranging the angle of my head with a blow from the heel of his hand. Back home, my mother would sigh and say, "Turn around.  Let's see what he did to you this time."

I've not big on personal adornment, and, perhaps because of my early hair experiences, I've never been comfortable in the barber's seat. As soon as the cloth is fastened around my neck I feel hogtied and hopeless. "What are they going to do to me today?" Once, on the west side of Manhattan, in the late 1960s, when my hair was rather long (it seems absurd that you could signal your opposition to the war in Vietnam by letting your hair grow, but such was the case), I walked into a shop and asked the barber to "leave it long." He immediately transformed me into a rabid supporter of carpet-bombing. Also in New York: when I naively wandered into a shop with a specialized clientele, a hair technician employing a razor and a variety of gels and lotions turned me into someone whose hair was giving off signals with which the rest of his body was not in accord. In Hanover, New Hampshire, in an upstairs 'salon,' the barber suddenly stopped work, drew back, studied me for fifteen or twenty seconds, and asked, "Are you Jewish." I mumbled something about not really wanting to discuss my ethnicity with him, whereupon he launched into a disquisition of which I understood not much and remember less, except that that it involved prophecy, the Book of Isaiah, and The Hatching of the Egg. He hauled out his heavily annotated King James Version and pointed me to various passages underlined in coded colors. As it happens, I'm more conversant than most people with scripture, and so I can assert with moderate authority that his reading of the Bible was -- how shall I say -- original. It took me an hour to extricate myself from his insistent and wayward scholarship: fifteen minutes of hair-cutting and forty-five minutes of exegetical enthusiasm.   

For a decade or so, when our finances were perilous, my wife cut my hair. There were some benefits (a guy could cop a feel while being ministered to) but I must admit that although my good woman was earnest and effective, she never fully mastered tonsorial technique. She had the habit of yanking upwards on the strands with the scissors, with the result that each snip produced a stab of pain -- although nothing more intense than might have been alleviated by the injection of a dozen or score shots of novocaine directly into the scalp. And then there were the ear nicks.

After a while, I returned hair responsibility to the world of commerce. I had success for many years with Liz of Chicago Hair across town. Liz was good at her work and respected my multiple cowlicks. But then she started to raise her prices. When she reached $20, I would just hand her the Visa and ask her not to tell me what she charged. When she went to $30, I retaliated by spacing the haircuts further and further apart in order to keep my annual cost constant. But when she broached the $40 barrier, the puritan in me rebelled. I started to patronize the cheap ($14) barbershop across the street from the college. There's a rotating staff and it's hit-and-miss: sometimes the results are acceptable, sometimes disastrous.   

When I come home from the expedition, my wife says, "Let's see what they've done to you today."

And then she sighs. 

Frost

When I lived in Cambridge in the first years of the 1960s, it was not unusual to encounter, on a warm winter afternoon, the poet Robert Frost walking slowly along Massachusetts Avenue. I'd watch him as he strolled over to Plympton Street and to the Grolier -- which was then as now, I imagine, the only all-poetry bookstore in America. One day I crept behind him to the shop and sat in a secluded corner, studying him as he browsed the shelf of new arrivals. With his leathery old skin and unruly iridescent white hair, he was an iconic figure -- famous not only among friends of poetry but among readers of Life and Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post. When he "said" his poems at Sanders Theater (in late 1961 or 1962), he filled every seat and every standpoint of a large auditorium. He was an honest-to-goodness celebrity, a presence, a man who had created a body of work and had earned a reputation that no poet or cultural figure today can rival.

At JFK's inauguration in January of 1961, Frost commanded a national television audience. He started to read the poem he had composed for the occasion, but his 87-year-old eyes were blinded by the bright sunlight and he couldn't continue. There was a moment of embarrassment, and I remember cringing in sympathy with his struggle. But then he gathered himself and recited from memory, in a rejuvenated voice, "The Gift Outright." "She was our land more than a hundred years/ Before we were her people." It's an almost mystical but grandly patriotic poem about rude, unlettered colonials transforming themselves into a Nation. "Such as we were we gave ourselves outright.../ To the land vaguely realizing westward,/ But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, / Such as she was, such as she would become."

Frost died in January of 1963, just ten months before our young president was shot. It's almost impossible now to reconstruct the effervescence of the Kennedy years -- a brief exciting moment between the lukewarm bland Eisenhower administration and the interminable nightmare of Vietnam. Frost's "Dedication," the poem that he couldn't read at the inaugural, is not his best work, but its last lines catch the spirit of the time. The poet took his inspiration from the Rome of Augustus and of Horace, Virgil, and Ovid. "It is no miracle the mood is high," he wrote.  "It makes the prophet in us all presage/ The glory of the next Augustan age/ Of a power leading from its strength and pride,/ Of young ambition eager to be tried,/ Firm in our free beliefs without dismay,/ In any game the nations want to play./ A golden age of poetry and power/ Of which this noonday's the beginning hour." Frost proved to be a better poet than a prophet. Instead of a golden age of poetry and power, we've had, after the three horrible murders, a parade of fools: first the crook, then the senile puppet, then the congressional fellatio hunters, and now the smirking, dangerous dunce. 

Like the nation, I too am in steep decline. It used to be that I could memorize short poems with ease. Nowadays, it's a titanic effort of will. To forestall hardening of the mind, and in a desperate effort to keep my brain supple, I decided to memorize Frost's "Birches." It's when you learn a poem by heart that you truly appreciate it, and so I can now say with absolute confidence and authority that "Birches" is a poem not just for the age, but for all time. In point of fact, I've been bothering myself about how Frost will fare in civilizations as far into the future as Virgil and Horace are in our past. Will students of poetry be able to grasp the subtlety of "Birches?" The story, the plot itself, will pose no problem. Frost knows that birches are bent to the ground by ice-storms, but he would fancifully "prefer to have some boy bend them/ As he went out and in to fetch the cows." For the "boy," tree-climbing is a high art: "He always kept his poise/ To the top branches, climbing carefully/ With the same pains you use to fill a cup/ Up to the brim, and even above the brim." Frost then shifts perspective, and the fantasy that birches are bent not by ice-storms but by athletic youngsters transforms into a memory, a truth: "So was I once myself a swinger of birches;/ And so I dream of going back to be." He closes the poem with a vision in which he leaves the real world and starts life anew: "I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,/ And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk/ Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,/ But dipped its top and set me down again." Even though our descendants will read the poem in an extinct language and in an edition encrusted with explanatory footnotes, I'm sure that they'll understand its outline. (I imagine too that some future scholar will make his career by explicating the line "A boy too far from town to learn baseball.") But will anyone in 4006 A.D. be sufficiently conversant with everyday twentieth-century American English to recognize the skill with which Frost masks his deep insights into the relationship between the material and the eternal with art-that-hides-art colloquialisms? Or appreciate to the full the sly understatement of "one could do worse than be a swinger of birches?" The beauty and the profundity of "Birches" tease us who share Frost's language. What a challenge the poem will be eighty generations down the road! Moreover, Is there even the remotest possibility that our successors will be equipped to grasp how much of Roman poetry (Ovid especially) Frost distills into "I'd like to get away from earth awhile/ And then come back to it and begin over./ May no fate willfully misunderstand me/ And half grant what I wish and snatch me away/ Not to return." Frost possessed the genius to keep us in touch with our past and to connect us to our future.

I wish that I had talked to Robert Frost that winter day when he was trudging on. "How are you, Mr. Frost," I might have asked. Perhaps he would have smiled or said "Nice day."

That would have been a good thing to recall.   

What We Read in the Fifties: Ivanhoe

For an entire lifetime I've had a ghastly relationship with Sir Walter Scott. Ivanhoe was a mandatory book in the Erasmus Hall High School English curriculum and I remember reading the novel with painful indifference. It's entirely possible that I didn't persevere to the final pages but instead relied upon the 1952 film. At various times I've made an effort to read novels by Sir Walter, but time and again I've foundered. Twenty or so years ago, Old Mortality and Redgauntlet were being trumpeted by academic critics, and I gave each novel a fair trial, but, after a chapter or two, ran aground on the sandbar of dullness. As part of my project of re-reading books that were popular or required in the 1950s, I tackled Ivanhoe again, and I can report that this time I read it to the very last drop -- but what a colossal effort! I never "got into" it but read it in gobbets of five or six pages at a time before succumbing to boredom or sleep. I deserve the 2006 Bulwer-Lytton Prize for Drudgery.

Why did our elders judge Ivanhoe to be suitable for 10th graders? The plot plods, the characters are unidimensional cliches, and there's a total want of suspense. The dialogue is ludicrous. It reminds me of what Jonson said about Spenser--that "in affecting the ancients, he writ no language." But in point of fact, Scott does write a language--he writes bad Blackadderese. "Fear not, my lord. I must speak with you in private, before you mount your palfrey." "Have patience, sir. I might retort your accusation, and blame the inconsiderate levity which foiled my design."  "A truce with your raillery, sir knight."  "If thou refusest my fair proffer, the provost of the lists shall cut thy bow-string, break thy bow and arrows and expel thee from the presence as a faint-hearted craven." And on and on for four hundred mucilaginous pages.   

There's another roadblock to empathetic reading. Ivanhoe features a Jewish money-lender named Isaac who's a walking inventory of stereotypes: he's usurious, greedy, faint-hearted, fawning, and although he claims poverty, is secretly rolling in shekels. He sums up all the worst aspects of both Shylock and Fagin. But Scott thinks we should forgive Isaac even though he's such a miserable human being, and by asking us to do so, he somehow manages to make tolerance even more offensive than bigotry itself.In addition, Isaac has an impossibly beauteous and virtuous daughter named Rebecca. Yes, it's a miracle, says Scott, but there are Jews (or at least Jewesses) who are not money-grubbing villains. Thanks a lot, Sir Walter. 

Why was Ivanhoe high-school fare?  Beats the heck out of me. And it makes me angry to think that this bad book was thrust down our throats. Let's put those upstart immigrants in their place, is what they were saying. Was it malevolent or merely unconscious? Difficult to ascertain, but after slogging through Ivanhoe, I'm not in a forgiving mood.   

January 7.  I've now watched the 1952 Ivanhoe with Elizabeth Taylor as Jessica, an aging Robert Taylor as Ivanhoe, and an aging Joan Fontaine as Rowena. It's a bit dated and it occasionally anticipates Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but it's not half bad. The writer, who had the wonderful name of Aeneas McKenzie, discarded the novel, started from scratch, and composed a screenplay that has action and adventure and romance and every once in a while borrows an incident from Sir Walter Scott. A good strategy, in my view.

Some Shops

We're just back from a week in Greenwich Village. Here are some of the stores that were within two or three blocks of our temporary residence: "Beasty Feast Pet Food Supplies"; "Cherry Boxx" (sex toys and outfits); "Golden Rule Wine and Liquor"; "Henrietta Hudson Bar and Girl"; "Badlands Entertainment" (xxx videos); "Condomania" -- all kinds of condoms and related gear; "Suds Cafe" (a laundromat and espresso bar); a shop that specializes in "eyebrow threading"; the "Sports Cap and Hat Store"; "Man + Plus" (which I read as Man plus plus); "Yuki's Chinese Restaurant" (bad corporate name); "Birthday Suit" (bachelorette-fetish, the sign clarified); the "Why Not Men's Spa"; "Pet Portraits"; "Doodle-Doos" (a children's hair salon); "Kid's RX" (children's prescription drugs); and "Cowgirl" -- I couldn't recognize anything in the cowgirl stock, certainly nothing that would home on the range; also, an admirable piece of commercial hyperbole: "Splendid Dry Cleaners." In addition, a truck bearing the name "Dr. Playground" -- mobile playground repairs, I would suppose. All in all, quite a remarkable display of capitalist initiative.

Xmas Thoughts

If the profoundly religious seventeenth-century founders of our country had a single favorite Biblical moment, it might be where the Lord (speaking through His prophet Amos) severely condemned the vanity of holidays. "I hate," said the Lord, "I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies."  The Lord of Hosts specifically enjoined against the attempt to placate him by sacrificing animals (a matter of topical concern in Amos' time).  "Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them; neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts."  Nor did He rest with these easy-to-follow injunctions, but He went on to condemn all musical tributes as well.  Nor more chants, glees or carols: "Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols."  Our Puritan forefathers interpreted these lines correctly; they recognized that the Lord opposed not only ritual sacrifice and music but all formal observance and rote piety. The Ancient of Days made it abundantly clear that what moved him was not empty ceremony but genuine morality.  HIs solution: "let justice run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream."  Taking these uncompromising sentences as their guide, our founders dug in their heels against the ostentatious celebration of of all holidays, especially Christmas.

Would they not have been reduced to angry and impotent sobs by the grotesque consumerism -- the burnt offerings and squeaking timbrels  -- that in 2006 substitute for justice and righteousness?  Could there be anything more loathsome either to Amos or to our devout ancestors than "Silent Night" at a shopping mall?

Ah for a twenty-first century Amos!

Further observations on the "holiday season" can be found here.

The P. S. 217 "Assembly"

During the 1940s and early 1950s, when I was a pupil at P. S. 217, the school auditorium was given over to formal weekly "assemblies." Boys were required to wear white shirts and green ties (girls had a specified outfit as well, but in those days I was so unconscious of a) girls and b) their costumes that I'm darned if I can remember what was worn by the young ladies). Before entering the auditorium, classes lined up in "size places." P. S. 217 was particularly strong on "size places" -- a point of particular humiliation for me, because I was, as WS says about R of G, "so long a-growing, and so leisurely" that I was by far the smallest child in every class from first grade to eighth. After we found our assigned seats (boys in one row, girls in the next), our principal Miss Bildersee, a formidable and incredibly ancient woman with nostrils so huge and distended that an agile boy could go spelunking in them, would perform the mandatory reading from the Bible. Blessings on her fond old heart, Miss Bildersee regularly choose melodious passages from the book of Psalms. I was particularly struck by the eloquence of "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful," with its abrupt counterbalancing antistrophe: "the ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away." After the Bible reading and some announcements, there was usually a performance of some sort. Choral readings, the oddest of art forms, were far too frequent. I remember that I was once a member of a sextet of quavering sopranos who memorized and recited the patriotic World War I poem "In Flanders Fields." What in the world was a second-grader supposed to make of "We are the Dead. Short days ago/ We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,/Loved and were loved, and now we lie/In Flanders fields./Take up our quarrel with the foe:/To you from failing hands we throw/The torch; be yours to hold it high./If ye break faith with us who die/ We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/ In Flanders fields." (Such poppycock was received as true literary greatness. It would have been beyond utopian imagination that our teachers would have known or introduced us to the distinguished WWI poetry of Wilfred Owen or Isaac Rosenberg or Siegfried Sassoon or Edward Thomas.) Then our music specialist Mrs. Georgia Keiselbach would sit down at the piano and teach us songs, some of them also left over from the first World War:  "Keep the home-fires burning,/ While your hearts are yearning,/ Though your lads are far away/ They dream of home;/ There's a silver lining/Through the dark cloud shining,/Turn the dark cloud inside out,/Till the boys come home." And also: "Give me some men who are stout-hearted men/ Who will fight for the right they adore... Shoulder to shoulder, and bolder and bolder."  And: "Tramp, tramp, tramp along the highway/Tramp, tramp, tramp, the road is free...  We're planters and Canucks/ Virginians and Kentucks/Captain Dick's own Infantry/ Captain Dick's own Infantry," which I now know to have come from Victor Herbert's Naughty Marietta (1910) and which provoked a great deal of surreptitious tittering because it had the word "dick" in it. In those unenlightened days we sang very many overtly religious songs: "White Christmas" and "Silent Night" and "Easter Parade." I much admired the tune of "The First Noel" but I had no idea what was meant by "born is the king of Israel" -- the only Israel I knew of was a recently-founded democracy. I loved the Thanksgiving hymn "We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing;/ He chastens and hastens His will to make known;/ The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing,/ Sing praises to His name; He forgets not his own" and many more stanzas, none of which I could parse or understand (still can't, in fact!). Another Thanksgiving song: "Over the river and through the woods/ To grandmother's house we go/The horse knows the way/To carry the sleigh...," which I found to be curiously disorienting because my particular grandmother lived in a tiny third-floor walkup on noisy and sweaty Coney Island Avenue. We sang the immensely mysterious Lord's Prayer (in the Schubert setting, I later discovered). Why did we so?  Were the heathens and Jews among us expected to convert on the spot? I much preferred the patriotic songs, although even they too were permeated with inexplicable theology. We were fervent jingos.   Not one, but two full stanzas of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic": "In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,/With a glory in His bosom, that transfigures you and me/ As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,/ For God is marching on." And two stanzas also of "The Star-Spangled Banner": "Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand/ Between their loved home and the war's desolation!/ Blessed with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land/ Praise the Power that hath made and preserv'd us a nation./Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,/ And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'" I preferred the rousing "O Columbia! the gem of the ocean,/ The home of the brave and the free,/ The shrine of each patriot's devotion,/ A world offers homage to thee" and "God Bless America" as well as the jingoist exceptionalism and cluttered syntax of "Our father's God, to thee/ Author of liberty/ To thee we sing./  Long may our land be bright/ With freedom's holy light;/ Protect us by thy might/ Great God our King." 

Here's a song we were distinctly not taught and did not sing: "This land is your land, this land is my land/ From California, to the New York Island./ From the redwood forest, to the Gulf Stream waters/ This land was made for you and me." We especially did not sing: "In the squares of the city  -- in the shadow of the steeple/  Near the relief office -- I see my people/ And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin' /If this land's still made for you and me."

December 17.  I now remember that we sang musical settings to two familiar poems. The first, Emma Lazarus's inscription on the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore." Hey, that's my grandparents you're calling "wretched refuse." The second, Joyce Kilmer's horrid "Trees": "I think that I shall never see/  A poem lovely as a tree...  A tree who's hungry mouth is pressed/ Against the earth's sweet-flowing breast" etc.  This song was only palatable because it allowed us to say the word "breast" out loud. 

(Thanks to Steve and to Barry, graduates of P. S. 217, for jogging my memory;  thanks also to David [P. S. 102].

Graduates of P. S. 217 who happen to stumble onto this site: feel free to add comments or to forward this post to classmates with whom you might be in touch.)

Some Stretchers

We're in Washington visiting our four-year-old granddaughter (and her parents, of course).  This morning I walked the little girl to her Montessori pre-school. As we passed some dormant rhododendrons, the grand-daughter told me that she saw a "very large antelope" resting under the bushes.  I like her style -- not a dog, or even a deer -- an antelope!  And a very large one to boot.  I love her sincerity, and I love it that she's still young enough to live in the imagination.  What a gift!

Here are some other "stretchers"  -- Huck Finn's word  -- that she's told me during this visit.  That she once ate thirteen bananas in a row.  That her mother and her grandmother had just gone to the Antarctic.  That she had six brothers and eleven sisters.  That the cheese that she was eating was made entirely of "green slimy boogers."  That she had just pooped on her cat.  That she built the neighbor's new picket fence.  "You did?  How did you do it?"   "With power tools."   That she had eaten a whole meal of eyeballs.

Well, she'll have to live in the world of hard facts soon enough.  Everyone must, even those of our leaders who would prefer to reject the "reality-based"  universe.  I say, let her enjoy the fantasy just as long as she is able. 

Among the Struldbrugs

In the little read Book III of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Lemuel Gulliver finds himself on the island of Luggnagg, where there is a group of people called Struldbrugs who are "blessed" with eternal life.  On hearing of Struldbrugs, Gulliver waxes ecstatic:  "happiest, beyond all comparison, are those excellent STRULDBRUGS, who, being born exempt from that universal calamity of human nature, have their minds free and disengaged, without the weight and depression of spirits caused by the continual apprehensions of death!"  Gulliver is soon disabused of his enthusiasm.  He learns that after an allotted number of years have passed, the Struldbrugs are declared legally dead, but that they continue to grow older, feebler, and more wretched.  It's hard to know whether Swift points his satire at human optimism or whether he is simply repulsed by extreme old age.

In any case, we've been spending much time at the nursing home lately, visiting the Aged P (I'm using the euphemism adopted by John Wemmick in Great Expectations).  Friends, you don't have to voyage to Luggnagg to learn that it's possible to live far too long;  the evidence is close at hand.  Let's try to remember to get the heck out of here while the going's good -- before we too are metamorphosized into a bunch of Struldbrugs.