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Monday, October 7, 2019

Averages and Evolution

In a novel I am reading (Kronik Burung Pegas, by Haruki Murakami, English title The Windup Bird Chronicle), and have been reading for a long while (it's 900 pages of small print), a teenage girl asks the question 'What would happen if people lived forever? Would they care very much about things going on in the world? She concludes that they would not, that there would exist no sense of urgency pressing them to get anything done, anything explained, anything accomplished. All things can be put off till tomorrow, ad infinitum. Why would any of these human philosophies matter? In fact, she theorizes, it is our mortality that drives us to strive toward meaningful philosophies, toward fathoming, toward fashioning some sort of permanence that will outlast the individual. It is therefore convenient for evolution to include death such that the species itself, ironically, may evolve. 

It's not something I had ever thought about. Murakami is good at that--at coming up with stuff people have not really thought about.  But I reckon, upon consideration, that the girl is just about right. Death, in this sphere anyway, in this dimension that we know, happens in the interest of mankind. It is as much a part of the plan as birth. 

Is this also why we feel, as we grow older, as we see more and more clearly the edge of the far horizon now drawn near, a sense of urgency become more urgent yet? We think 'Okay, I know, I have always known. I just didn't intend to get here so quickly. But wait, I'm not done. There are things that need to be ordered, put in place, tidied up. There are loose ends that need to be tied. The work is not done.'

I am 65 now, for just a few more months. Perhaps. I wonder if these things work on a sort of hereditary average. If I take the ages of my immediate family members, the average age of demise puts me at 56.75. Therefore, I have already outlived myself by roughly 9 years. Talk about a sense of urgency! Furthermore, if you add in the ages of my grandparents on my father's side, my average age of demise decreases even further. On the other hand, my mother was adopted and had no knowledge of who her birth parents were or how long they lived. Who knows, maybe each of them lived well past 100. This would significantly elevate my own result.

But maybe it doesn't work this way. Who can say? What we do know, what we cannot change, is inevitability itself. We must all evolve. It is the one thing we have done together from the very beginning. 

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