0:00:00.774,0:00:03.166
I'm turning 44 next month,

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and I have the sense that 44[br]is going to be a very good year,

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a year of fulfillment, realization.

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I have that sense,

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not because of anything[br]particular in store for me,

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but because I read it would be a good year

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in a 1968 book by Norman Mailer.

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"He felt his own age, forty-four ..."

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wrote Mailer in "The Armies of the Night,"

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"... felt as if he were a solid embodiment

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of bone, muscle, heart, mind,[br]and sentiment to be a man,

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as if he had arrived."

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Yes, I know Mailer[br]wasn't writing about me.

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But I also know that he was;

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for all of us -- you, me,[br]the subject of his book,

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age more or less in step,

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proceed from birth[br]along the same great sequence:

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through the wonders[br]and confinements of childhood;

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the emancipations[br]and frustrations of adolescence;

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the empowerments[br]and millstones of adulthood;

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the recognitions[br]and resignations of old age.

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There are patterns to life,

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and they are shared.

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As Thomas Mann wrote:[br]"It will happen to me as to them."

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We don't simply live these patterns.

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We record them, too.

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We write them down in books,[br]where they become narratives

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that we can then read and recognize.

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Books tell us who we've been,

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who we are, who we will be, too.

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So they have for millennia.

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As James Salter wrote,

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"Life passes into pages[br]if it passes into anything."

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And so six years ago,[br]a thought leapt to mind:

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if life passed into pages,[br]there were, somewhere,

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passages written about every age.

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If I could find them, I could[br]assemble them into a narrative.

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I could assemble them into a life,

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a long life, a hundred-year life,

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the entirety of that same great sequence

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through which the luckiest among us pass.

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I was then 37 years old,

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"an age of discretion,"[br]wrote William Trevor.

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I was prone to meditating on time and age.

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An illness in the family[br]and later an injury to me

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had long made clear that growing old[br]could not be assumed.

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And besides, growing old[br]only postponed the inevitable,

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time seeing through[br]what circumstance did not.

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It was all a bit disheartening.

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A list, though, would last.

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To chronicle a life[br]year by vulnerable year

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would be to clasp and to ground[br]what was fleeting,

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would be to provide myself and others[br]a glimpse into the future,

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whether we made it there or not.

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And when I then began to compile my list,[br]I was quickly obsessed,

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searching pages and pages[br]for ages and ages.

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Here we were at every annual step[br]through our first hundred years.

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"Twenty-seven ... a time[br]of sudden revelations,"

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"sixty-two, ... of subtle diminishments."

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I was mindful, of course,[br]that such insights were relative.

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For starters, we now live longer,[br]and so age more slowly.

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Christopher Isherwood used[br]the phrase "the yellow leaf"

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to describe a man at 53,

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only one century after Lord Byron[br]used it to describe himself at 36.

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(Laughter)

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I was mindful, too, that life[br]can swing wildly and unpredictably

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from one year to the next,

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and that people may experience[br]the same age differently.

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But even so, as the list coalesced,

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so, too, on the page, clear[br]as the reflection in the mirror,

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did the life that I had been living:

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finding at 20 that "... one is less[br]and less sure of who one is;"

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emerging at 30 from the "... wasteland[br]of preparation into active life;"

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learning at 40 "... to close softly[br]the doors to rooms

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[I would] not be coming back to."

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There I was.

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Of course, there we all are.

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Milton Glaser, the great graphic designer

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whose beautiful[br]visualizations you see here,

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and who today is 85 --

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all those years "... a ripening[br]and an apotheosis," wrote Nabokov --

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noted to me that, like art and like color,

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literature helps us to remember[br]what we've experienced.

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And indeed, when I shared[br]the list with my grandfather,

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he nodded in recognition.

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He was then 95 and soon to die,

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which, wrote Roberto Bolaño,

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"... is the same as never dying."

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And looking back, he said to me that, yes,

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Proust was right that at 22,[br]we are sure we will not die,

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just as a thanatologist[br]named Edwin Shneidman was right

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that at 90, we are sure we will.

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It had happened to him,

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as to them.

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Now the list is done:

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a hundred years.

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And looking back over it,

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I know that I am not done.

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I still have my life to live,

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still have many more pages to pass into.

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And mindful of Mailer,

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I await 44.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)