You're Looking Very Well: The Surprising Nature of Getting Old by Wolpert Lewis

Author:Wolpert, Lewis [Wolpert, Lewis]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780571250660
Publisher: Faber
Published: 2011-03-31T20:00:00+00:00

How long would we like to live? Polls show that on average people want to live to about 90, though some 15 per cent had no idea how long they wished to live. Many were rightly very concerned about health as they aged, and one half, for example, feared the inability to drive their car. The elderly were less fearful than the young. Only about half of the public want scientists to work on mechanisms of age extension.

The Japanese artist Hokusai made his famous wood-block print of The Great Wave off Kanagawa in the 1820s at the age of around 65. Even after reaching the age of eighty, he was busy producing many fine prints. He often expressed his desire to live beyond the age of 90, and just before he died at the age of 88 he sighed and said his last words: ‘If heaven gives me ten more years, or an extension of even five years, I shall surely become a true artist.’ He also wrote:

All I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-three I learned about the real structure of nature, of animals, trees, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence when I am eighty, I shall have made still more progress. At ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at a hundred I shall certainly have reached a marvellous stage; and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive. I beg those who live as long as I to see if I do not keep my word.

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