My old friend and colleague C came to the "Job and the Arts" class yesterday to help us think about Shakespeare's King Lear - a story sufficently like and unlike Job's to raise lots of interesting questions. She showed clips from two very different productions, and we had students break out and compare them and reflect on what actors and directors bring to this or other plays concerned with human suffering. Lots of issues came up, but I was floored by an aside in C's response to a group which had pointed to the questions of aging posed by Lear. In affirming the importance of that theme she said getting old before we are wise was only more relevant a concern today and for them, considering that many of you will live into your hundreds.
I'm not sure why but this aside took my breath away. I guess I've accepted that changes in lifestyle and environment mean that human lifespans have topped out... but when you consider that there are people living into their hundreds right now, there are surely young people I know now who will do the same. One folks I know will certainly see the twenty-second century. This is obvious when you think about it but somehow I had not thought about it. This seems a massive sort of failing given that I work with young people - and supposedly think about the Anthropocene. What's so unthinkable about this? C has college age children; I felt exposed as a part of the "childless left." (But when I told two students about C's remark today and asked if they expected to live into their hundreds they balked too.)
As it happens, thinking in terms of 100 year Liberian lifespans is encouraged also by a passage in Rebecca Solnit's Orwell's Roses, which I am reading with gusto. In a section reprinted in the Guardian Solnit writes
There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about 100 years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish civil war or the last person who saw the last passenger pigeon is gone.
Solnit mentions this in the context of reflecting on the different ways of experiencing time which trees afford us - and the ways they also connect us to to people who lived before or will live after us. Someone may have planted the tree under which we find shelter today - and someone may find solace under a tree whose seed we plant today. Solnit's rhapsodizing on an observation of Orwell's in a similar register: every time you commit an antisocial act, to make a note of it in your diary, and then, at the appropriate season, push an acorn into the ground.
But today I was thinking about the human acorns all around me and the blighted world they will be inhabiting long after I am gone. (Long?) Those whose lives will be rendered precarious by global heating, ecological collapse and the rest aren't strangers in the future - not that strangers in the future should have less claim on our concern. For that matter, just like those already centenarian today, this precarity isn't just a thing of the future but a present reality for many. These are all things I know, or thought I knew. Anthropocene apocalypses are not just notional events in the future but present and, indeed, have happened already manu times to the people of indigenous worlds. C's comment made me realize I haven't really taken in the enormity of it.
FOOL: