LOVE ME FOREVER
Greenland has been in our news more than ever before. But it’s been political news, and Professor Engel is an English professor, not one of political science. Also, Professor Engel is not a fool. He would not be overtly political in his essays, in case they would alienate even one delightful reader. I am just happy all of us agree on the one most important point: that we can’t wait to hear what I have to say every other Monday. I know I can’t. So, Professor E, get back to Greenland: now.
The Greenland I mention here concerns one of its group of natives who call this island — the largest in the world that is not a continent — home. Strangely, these natives have never set foot in Greenland. Stranger still, they don’t even have feet with which to step. They are the Greenland sharks.
And what is distinctive about them? It’s a biggie: they are the longest living creatures on the planet, with a lifespan of 300-500 years. Can you imagine? There actually could be a shark swimming today off the Greenland coast that began its life in 1525, the same year that King Henry VIII began his extramarital wooing of Anne Boleyn, leading to her untimely beheading a few years later at the age of 29. That sad event made Anne’s life span about 400 years shorter than that of a Greenland shark. Such are the vagaries in our unstable world for both queens and fish.
It doesn’t seem fair that a species of rather primitive shark comes far closer than we do to living one of mankind’s fondest dreams: being able to live longer than our measly average of around eight decades. And that dream has become even more tempting in this twenty-first century, now that advancements in public health, medicine, and technology have increased the average lifespan from only 47.3 years in 1900 to an astounding 78.4 years in our country today. We’ve added more than thirty years to our average lifespan in just over one hundred years. How amazing is that?
Ah, but here’s the rub. All of us dream about having more time to enjoy our life in this world, as long as we include the infinitive “to enjoy”. But longer life without decent health, or longer life full of tragedy and misfortune is suddenly not as much a dream as it would be a nightmare.
It was the ancient Greeks who best expressed this desire for infinitely more life but with conditions. Those Greeks were so wise about so much. This long-ago civilization, whose golden age was a mere one hundred years from 480BC to 380BC, created much of our modern world. They invented — incredibly — democracy, philosophy, drama and theatre, logic, and the basis of modern medicine (as set down by Hippocrates). They gave us not only our alphabet of twenty-six letters (which we’ve modeled strictly on theirs of twenty-four), but also the name to this system by donating their first two letters: ALPHA-BETa.
And it was their myth of Tithonus that so vividly cautions us against wishing for immortality. Eos, the Goddess of Dawn, falls in love with Tithonus, a handsome young human, and asks Zeus to make him immortal so they can love together forever. Zeus quickly grants her wish, before she realizes that she forgot to ask that Tithonus remain eternally young. And so Tithonus ages eternally into debilitating, withered old age, babbling endlessly for death to release him.
Taking pity on him, Zeus turns him into an insect so that his endless jabber, bemoaning his immortality, could become the bug’s loud, high-pitched buzzing. That insect is the cicada.
When the ancient Greeks heard its incessant noise, 2500 years ago, they remembered the myth. Their ancient world was animated with the incredible mythology they had invented to make all nature alive with meaning. Our religions today also animate our universe with moral lessons, though perhaps without that pagan rollicking delight in a good story — Pandora’s Box, Medusa, Zeus, the Cyclops, King Midas…the list is endless.
The Greenland shark’s longevity might tease us into wishing for its centuries of living, but Tithonus knew better. As did my Sunday school teacher, Miss Max. She taught us that what we do for ourselves dies with us, but what we do for others remains and is therefore immortal. I didn’t really understand this at age 15. I do, now, at 77.
When asked if he thought he might achieve immortality through his movies, Woody Allen provided a more lighthearted, comical take: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality by not ever dying. And I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on and on in my apartment.”
Email Elliot at huffam@me.com or click here