WEBVTT

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

00:00:03.190 --> 00:00:07.670
and I have the sense that 44
is going to be a very good year,

00:00:07.694 --> 00:00:10.595
a year of fulfillment, realization.

00:00:11.532 --> 00:00:12.895
I have that sense,

00:00:12.919 --> 00:00:15.966
not because of anything
particular in store for me,

00:00:15.990 --> 00:00:18.750
but because I read it would be a good year

00:00:18.774 --> 00:00:21.775
in a 1968 book by Norman Mailer.

NOTE Paragraph

00:00:22.497 --> 00:00:25.449
"He felt his own age, forty-four ..."

00:00:25.473 --> 00:00:28.391
wrote Mailer in "The Armies of the Night,"

00:00:28.415 --> 00:00:30.877
"... felt as if he were a solid embodiment

00:00:30.901 --> 00:00:34.671
of bone, muscle, heart, mind,
and sentiment to be a man,

00:00:34.695 --> 00:00:36.534
as if he had arrived."

NOTE Paragraph

00:00:37.207 --> 00:00:39.711
Yes, I know Mailer
wasn't writing about me.

00:00:40.295 --> 00:00:42.083
But I also know that he was;

00:00:42.617 --> 00:00:46.591
for all of us -- you, me,
the subject of his book,

00:00:46.615 --> 00:00:48.825
age more or less in step,

00:00:48.849 --> 00:00:51.814
proceed from birth
along the same great sequence:

00:00:53.224 --> 00:00:55.782
through the wonders
and confinements of childhood;

00:00:56.425 --> 00:00:59.761
the emancipations
and frustrations of adolescence;

00:01:00.380 --> 00:01:03.499
the empowerments
and millstones of adulthood;

00:01:04.188 --> 00:01:07.714
the recognitions
and resignations of old age.

00:01:08.391 --> 00:01:10.293
There are patterns to life,

00:01:10.317 --> 00:01:11.651
and they are shared.

00:01:12.230 --> 00:01:17.029
As Thomas Mann wrote:
"It will happen to me as to them."

NOTE Paragraph

00:01:17.772 --> 00:01:19.989
We don't simply live these patterns.

00:01:20.013 --> 00:01:21.742
We record them, too.

00:01:21.766 --> 00:01:24.973
We write them down in books,
where they become narratives

00:01:24.997 --> 00:01:27.191
that we can then read and recognize.

00:01:27.669 --> 00:01:29.960
Books tell us who we've been,

00:01:29.984 --> 00:01:32.826
who we are, who we will be, too.

00:01:33.492 --> 00:01:35.455
So they have for millennia.

00:01:36.162 --> 00:01:37.805
As James Salter wrote,

00:01:37.829 --> 00:01:41.756
"Life passes into pages
if it passes into anything."

NOTE Paragraph

00:01:42.979 --> 00:01:46.348
And so six years ago,
a thought leapt to mind:

00:01:46.372 --> 00:01:50.303
if life passed into pages,
there were, somewhere,

00:01:50.327 --> 00:01:52.687
passages written about every age.

00:01:52.711 --> 00:01:56.291
If I could find them, I could
assemble them into a narrative.

00:01:56.315 --> 00:01:58.353
I could assemble them into a life,

00:01:58.377 --> 00:02:01.123
a long life, a hundred-year life,

00:02:01.147 --> 00:02:03.440
the entirety of that same great sequence

00:02:03.464 --> 00:02:06.028
through which the luckiest among us pass.

00:02:07.321 --> 00:02:09.797
I was then 37 years old,

00:02:10.613 --> 00:02:13.469
"an age of discretion,"
wrote William Trevor.

00:02:15.074 --> 00:02:18.298
I was prone to meditating on time and age.

00:02:18.322 --> 00:02:21.165
An illness in the family
and later an injury to me

00:02:21.189 --> 00:02:24.474
had long made clear that growing old
could not be assumed.

00:02:25.056 --> 00:02:28.691
And besides, growing old
only postponed the inevitable,

00:02:28.715 --> 00:02:31.392
time seeing through
what circumstance did not.

00:02:31.947 --> 00:02:33.755
It was all a bit disheartening.

NOTE Paragraph

00:02:34.413 --> 00:02:36.834
A list, though, would last.

00:02:37.334 --> 00:02:40.479
To chronicle a life
year by vulnerable year

00:02:40.503 --> 00:02:43.740
would be to clasp and to ground
what was fleeting,

00:02:43.764 --> 00:02:47.107
would be to provide myself and others
a glimpse into the future,

00:02:47.131 --> 00:02:48.909
whether we made it there or not.

00:02:49.574 --> 00:02:53.661
And when I then began to compile my list,
I was quickly obsessed,

00:02:53.685 --> 00:02:56.878
searching pages and pages
for ages and ages.

00:02:57.702 --> 00:03:01.937
Here we were at every annual step
through our first hundred years.

00:03:02.624 --> 00:03:05.636
"Twenty-seven ... a time
of sudden revelations,"

00:03:07.048 --> 00:03:10.616
"sixty-two, ... of subtle diminishments."

NOTE Paragraph

00:03:11.989 --> 00:03:15.889
I was mindful, of course,
that such insights were relative.

00:03:16.405 --> 00:03:20.460
For starters, we now live longer,
and so age more slowly.

00:03:21.151 --> 00:03:24.311
Christopher Isherwood used
the phrase "the yellow leaf"

00:03:24.335 --> 00:03:26.486
to describe a man at 53,

00:03:26.510 --> 00:03:30.829
only one century after Lord Byron
used it to describe himself at 36.

NOTE Paragraph

00:03:30.853 --> 00:03:33.130
(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

00:03:33.154 --> 00:03:36.773
I was mindful, too, that life
can swing wildly and unpredictably

00:03:36.797 --> 00:03:38.585
from one year to the next,

00:03:38.609 --> 00:03:41.384
and that people may experience
the same age differently.

00:03:42.045 --> 00:03:45.619
But even so, as the list coalesced,

00:03:45.643 --> 00:03:49.032
so, too, on the page, clear
as the reflection in the mirror,

00:03:49.056 --> 00:03:50.972
did the life that I had been living:

00:03:51.710 --> 00:03:55.129
finding at 20 that "... one is less
and less sure of who one is;"

00:03:56.002 --> 00:04:00.517
emerging at 30 from the "... wasteland
of preparation into active life;"

00:04:01.057 --> 00:04:05.173
learning at 40 "... to close softly
the doors to rooms

00:04:05.197 --> 00:04:07.326
[I would] not be coming back to."

00:04:08.720 --> 00:04:10.315
There I was.

NOTE Paragraph

00:04:11.885 --> 00:04:14.143
Of course, there we all are.

00:04:14.762 --> 00:04:17.200
Milton Glaser, the great graphic designer

00:04:17.224 --> 00:04:20.035
whose beautiful
visualizations you see here,

00:04:20.519 --> 00:04:22.379
and who today is 85 --

00:04:22.403 --> 00:04:26.503
all those years "... a ripening
and an apotheosis," wrote Nabokov --

00:04:27.211 --> 00:04:30.669
noted to me that, like art and like color,

00:04:31.455 --> 00:04:34.307
literature helps us to remember
what we've experienced.

NOTE Paragraph

00:04:35.095 --> 00:04:38.833
And indeed, when I shared
the list with my grandfather,

00:04:38.857 --> 00:04:40.593
he nodded in recognition.

00:04:41.339 --> 00:04:44.581
He was then 95 and soon to die,

00:04:45.234 --> 00:04:47.355
which, wrote Roberto Bolaño,

00:04:47.379 --> 00:04:49.700
"... is the same as never dying."

00:04:51.556 --> 00:04:54.196
And looking back, he said to me that, yes,

00:04:55.357 --> 00:04:59.849
Proust was right that at 22,
we are sure we will not die,

00:05:01.873 --> 00:05:04.654
just as a thanatologist
named Edwin Shneidman was right

00:05:04.678 --> 00:05:07.443
that at 90, we are sure we will.

00:05:09.229 --> 00:05:10.621
It had happened to him,

00:05:11.234 --> 00:05:12.439
as to them.

NOTE Paragraph

00:05:15.479 --> 00:05:16.932
Now the list is done:

00:05:18.169 --> 00:05:20.189
a hundred years.

00:05:21.443 --> 00:05:23.067
And looking back over it,

00:05:24.298 --> 00:05:26.204
I know that I am not done.

00:05:26.800 --> 00:05:28.895
I still have my life to live,

00:05:28.919 --> 00:05:31.419
still have many more pages to pass into.

00:05:32.546 --> 00:05:34.398
And mindful of Mailer,

00:05:34.422 --> 00:05:36.032
I await 44.

NOTE Paragraph

00:05:36.746 --> 00:05:37.924
Thank you.

NOTE Paragraph

00:05:37.948 --> 00:05:48.810
(Applause)