59

by Brian Hayes

Published 10 December 2008

It’s the custom among mathematicians that when you reach age 60, you’re put on an ice floe with a day’s supply of walrus meat and set adrift.

But I’m not a mathematician.

Computer scientists get a few years’ grace. Because they count in binary, for them the dreaded end of productive intellectual life is put off until age 2⁶.

I’m not a computer scientist either. I’m a writer. This is no dispensation, however; the literary world also worships precocity. Byron said it: “Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty-five?” I took an even harder line in my own youth. At age 16, when I ran away from home to write a novel, I vowed that I would be a famous author by 22 or find an ice floe and make an end of it.

And today I am 60–1, and I find I am not yet quite ready to be set out to sea. I look back to the poets who seemed so intensely young when I was young, and I find they have aged well. Here’s George Herbert:

Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart
Could have recovered greennesse? It was gone
Quite under ground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown;
    Where they together
    All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.
. . .
And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O my onely light,
    It cannot be
    That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night.

Responses from readers:

• A comment from rms, 12 December 2008 at 6:28 pm

  happy birthday! (no factorial meaning)

• A comment from Jim Ward, 15 December 2008 at 2:35 pm

  Set out to sea or set to sea?

  …
  There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;
  There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
  Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me,–
  That ever with a frolic welcome took
  The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
  Free hearts, free foreheads,– you and I are old;
  Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.
  Death closes all; but something ere the end,
  Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
  Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
  …

  http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/ulyssestext.html

• A comment from Barry Cipra, 16 December 2008 at 3:54 pm

  As J. Alfred so poetically put it,

  I grow old… I grow old…
  I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

  While you’re out there on your ice floe, listen for the mermaids singing, each to each.

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