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I'm turning 44 next month,
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and I have a sense that 44
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
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
of bone, muscle, heart, mind,
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and sentiment to be a man,
as if he had arrived."
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Yes, I know Mailer
wasn't writing about me,
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but I also know that he was,
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for all of us --
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you, me, the subject of his book --
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age more or less in step,
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proceed from birth
along the same great sequence,
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through the wonders
and confinements of childhood,
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the emancipations
and frustrations of adolescence,
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the empowerments
and millstones of adulthood,
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the recognitions
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,
"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,
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
if it passes into anything."
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And so six years ago,
a thought leapt to mind:
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if life passed into pages,
there were, somewhere,
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passages written about every age.
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If I could find them, I could
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,"
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
and later an injury to me
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had long made clear that growing old
could not be assumed,
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and besides, growing old
only postponed the inevitable,
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time seeing through
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
year by vulnerable year
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would be to clasp and to ground
what was fleeting,
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would be to provide myself
and others 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,
I was quickly obsessed,
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searching pages and pages
for ages and ages.
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Here we were at every annual step
through our first hundred years.
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Twenty-seven:
a time of sudden revolations.
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Sixty-two, of subtle diminishments.
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I was mindful, of course,
that such insights were relative.
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For starters, we now live longer,
and so age more slowly.
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Christopher Isherwood used
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
used it to describe himself at 36.
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(Laughter)
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I was mindful too that life
can swing wildly and unpredictably
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from one year to the next,
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and that people may experience
the same age differently.
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But even so, as the list coalesced,
so too on the page,
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clear as the reflection in the mirror,
did the life that I had been living:
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finding at 20 that one is less
and less sure of who one is;
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emerging at 30 from the wasteland
of preparation into active life;
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learning at 40 to close softly
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 visualizations
you see here
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and who today is 85 --
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"all those years a ripening
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
what we've experienced.
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And indeed, when I shared
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,
we are sure we will not die,
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just as a thanatologist
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 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)