The explorer further discovered that, after the age of eighty, the marriages of the Struldbrugs were dissolved, because the law thought it a reasonable indulgence that those who were condemned, without any fault of their own, to a perpetual continuance in the world, should not have their misery doubled by the load of a wife; also that they could never amuse themselves with reading, because their memory would not serve to carry them from the beginning of a sentence to the end; and after about two hundred years, they could not hold conversation with their neighbours, the mortals, because the language of the country was always upon the flux.
It is a pity that the laws of Laputa stringently forbade the export of Struldbrugs, else, Gulliver tells us, he would gladly have brought a couple to this country, to arm our people against the fear of death. Had he only done so, what a lot of letters to the Times, advertisements of patent medicines; and Eugenic discussions we should have been spared! If earthly immortality were known to be such a curse, we could more easily convince the most scrupulous devotee of health that old age was little better than immortality.
It is not, therefore, as though great age were such a catch that it should demand all these delicate manipulations of diet, sleep, rest-cures, health-resorts, scourings, and temperatures, for its attainment. How refreshing to escape from this hospital atmosphere into the free air, blowing whither it lists, and to fling oneself carelessly upon existence, as Sir George Birdwood, for instance, has done! He also wrote to the Times, but in a very different tone. Like another Gulliver, he pictured the calamity of millionaires living on till their heirs are senile. It is all nonsense, he said, to prescribe rules for life. One of his oldest friends drank a bottle of cognac a day, and, as for himself—well, we know that he is eighty, has lived a varied and dangerous life in many lands, has written on carrots, chestnuts, carpets, art, scholarship, all manner of absorbing subjects, and yet he heartily survives:
"I attribute my senility—let others say senectitude," he shouts in his
cheery way, "to a certain playful devilry of spirit, a ceaseless
militancy, quite suffragettic, so that when I left the Indian Office on
a bilked pension I swore by all the gods I would make up for it by
living on ten years, instead of one, which was all an insurance society
told me I was worth."
That sounds the true note, blowing the horn of old forests and battles. "A playful devilry of spirit," "a ceaseless militancy"—how stirring to the stagnant lives of prudent regularity! "Lie in bed till noon-day!" he goes on; "I would rather be some monstrous flat-fish at the bottom of the Atlantic than accept human life on such terms." Who in future will hear of rest-cures, retirements, retreats, nursings, comforts, and attention to health, without beholding in his mind that monstrous flat-fish, blind and deaf with age, rotting at ease upon the Atlantic slime? Life is not measured by the ticking of a clock, and it is no new thing to discover eternity in a minute. "I have not time to make money," said the naturalist, Agassiz, when his friends advised some pecuniary advantage; and, in the same way, every really fortunate man says he has no time to bother about living. So soon as a human being does anything simply because he thinks it will "do him good," and not for pleasure, interest, or service, he should withdraw from this present world as gracefully as he can. Of course, we all want to live, but even in death there can hardly be anything so very awful, since it is so common.
"The Kingdom of Heaven is not meat and drink." "He that loses his life shall find it," said one Teacher. "Live dangerously," said another; and "Try to be killed" is still the best advice for a soldier who would rise. For life is to be measured by its intensity, and not by the tapping of a death-watch beetle. "I've lost my appetite. I can't eat!" groaned the patient whom Carlyle knew. "My dear sir, that is not of the slightest consequence," replied the good physician; and how wise are those scientists who deny to invalids the existence of their pain! Sir George Birdwood recalled the saying of Plato that attention to health is one of the greatest hindrances to life, and I vaguely remember Plato's commendation of the working-man, who, in illness, just takes a dose, and if that doesn't cure him, remarks, "If I must die, I must die," and dies accordingly. That is how the working-man dies still; though sometimes he is now buoyed up by the thought of his funeral's grandeur. "A certain playful devilry of spirit," "a ceaseless militancy"—for life or death those are the best regulations.
XXXVII
"LIBERTÉ, LIBERTÉ, CHÉRIE!"