Living to 100

Late last night I got the idea of living to 100. Why not? They say it's good to have goals and I haven't had any for awhile.

Why not live to 100? It would not only give me time to write and read all the books I want to read and write, it would give me time to change my habits, those habits which have the best chance of conspiring against my living to 100, like smoking cigars on the golf course, drinking ice cold vodka in the evening, eating tortilla chips smothered with Mrs. Renfro's hot green salsa at 2 am, watching too much MSNBC and C-SPAN tv, slumped on the couch with bad posture.

I've always been vague about death, living either like death doesn't exist or like it could happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, while permitting the overarching notion of it to be a kind of constant backdrop to virtually every idea I have or act I undertake. Perhaps there is no separating thinking from death, something I've never thought of before, though I'm sure others have, those of the Viennese school of Advanced Hyperanalysis or early punk rockers like Sid Vicious. I have looked death in the eye on occasion, almost always on the occasion of the death of a loved one, and found it sad, pathetic, and final. Then, after a proper period of mourning, death returns to its original conceptual vaporish hiding place in my consciousness, both invisible and all-pervading to the degree that I've decided Death, not life, is the all-time All-Star literary trope.

I was reading a writer new to me when the idea of living to 100 occured.

The writer is Joseph O'Neill, the book is Netherland (Pantheon Books, 2008).

O'Neill has a complicated biography. Born in Ireland, raised in Holland, a resident of New York City since the early 2000s. He has a law degree and practiced law. He must have been a banker too, he seems to know how the money part of the world works. I'm guessing he's now in his late 40s or early 50s. For awhile he lived with his wife and young child in the Hotel Chelsea, a place that provides the beginning background atmospherics for the novel.

The main 'character' in Netherland is New York City, post 9/11, as populated by immigrants. Therefore New York City, perforce the USA, is interpreted in a way that's most likely foreign to a native-born American.

O'Neill's story makes it possible for a reader to re-consider the democratic experience as the experiment it is. "All poetry is experimental poetry," Wallace Stevens is said to have said, and the word democracy could be substituted for the word poetry in Stevens statement with the same sense achieved.

Democracy is at best a big gamble, an either/or proposition: that either we heed the better nature(s) ascribed to us by neurologists in the popular press, or that we accept the concept of democracy as a political contrivance, a social delusion, and live with it as we live as is, along with the notion that we'll live forever.

The notion of democracy often gets linked up with the notion of community--think Mark Zuckerberg's defense of his product, Facebook (a case could be made that Zuckerberg be tried for war crimes)--but the notion of community as I understand it belongs more to the socialist view of things. The only truly successful community was Eden, an experiment that crumbled almost upon inception and has been crumbling ever since.

I've gambled and lost for most of my political "life", though once in awhile an issue or a candidate has slipped through the guard rail and raised little hackles of hope in my heart. But for the most part 'the will of the people' hasn't been my will. In fact, the will of the people as manifested in this country is now so grim that the prospect of continuing to participate in its politics makes reading a novel like O'Neill's--an informed outsider's view of living in the THE USA--a civic duty I can perform whole-heartedly, knowing no one will be harmed in the process and not one  family planning clinic will lose its funding.

But maybe I'm wrong, maybe this is the most glorious period yet in our republic, maybe statues will be erected in 100 years to our current President, hailing his at-the-time unpopular policies as visionary, noble, for the greater good of the people.

Living to 100 would seem to be a goal available to people of all races, creeds, and colors, a goal all us citizens could rally around. It's a gamble of course, but what have we got to lose?