Rebelling Against Aging

The possibility of treating aging is not just an idle fantasy. By altering the genes of the tiny worm Caenorhabditis elegans, one can slow their aging. The result is that the worms live much longer and they remain youthful and healthy longer. The current record for enhancing C. elegans longevity is an astonishing tenfold increase in lifespan.

Dr. David Gems

I am at that age where age ceases to remain graffitied in the fine print of consciousness and assumes the graphic clamor of 24 point boldfaced Verdana. Any articles I happen upon that treat the topic of biogerontology—the science of aging—exert an irresistible allure, even ones that deal with lowly nematodes like C. elegans. It’s not that I fear aging, or suffer debilitating anxiety about it; rather, it angers me. I don’t like it. I consider senescence a corporeal insult and betrayal. I remain as I always have been: enchanted by the abracadabra of life, of living in the kinesthetic world of unending experiences, of sights and sounds, of savors and tangs that touch us into being. And while those experiences can abrade, they can more often rub us the right way. The Hayflick limit, that built-in restriction on the number of times a normal cell divides before it stops, strikes me as abjectly cruel. Quite simply, I resent that my body, the body that embodies experience, gradually and inexorably dysfunctions and deteriorates all the way down to the cellular and molecular levels. I take umbrage at the body’s truculence, its maddening disregard for what I want, its crassly insistent bullying to keep me trussed up within it. I take offense at its methodical unkiltering, its havocing declension.

I am not alone in this. Most of us, I suspect, are Ponce de Leoned. Myths from every culture have featured anti-aging stories of immortality, and most every religion has offered, and continues to offer, a vision of and a process for achieving it. One of the oldest written literary works, The Epic of Gilgamesh, written more than 4,500 years ago, narrates on twelve cuneiform tablets a search for immortality. Poetic treatments of the afflictions of aging abound: William Butler Yeats does not fancy being “old and gray and full of sleep,/ And nodding by the fire,” nor does Mathew Arnold “It is to spend long days / And not once feel that we were ever young,” or Billy Collins “No wonder the moon in the window seems to have/ drifted/ out of a love poem that you used to know by/ heart.” William Wordsworth notes that nature “takes away/ Our playthings one by one.” Dylan Thomas counsels his father that “Old age should burn and rave at close of day;/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Donald Hall, with bitter irony, affirms “that it is fitting/and delicious to lose everything.” A lamenting Robert Frost observes that he “craved strong sweets, . . ./ when I was young;/ . . .Now no joy but lacks salt,/ That is not dashed with pain /And weariness and fault.”


The possibility of treating aging is not just an idle fantasy. By identifying genes that control aging rates, we can also learn about the underlying biology of aging. We can explore the aging-related processes that the genes influence. Many aging genes are associated with a nutrient-sensitive signalling network. Dampening the signals that this network transmits slows growth, increases resistance to stress and increases lifespan.

So, when a biogerontologist like David Gems offers scientific support suggesting that senescence is a treatable disease, I pay attention. I want my golden years to be aurific, to carbon-copy the “Late Ripeness” that Czeslaw Milosz experiences as he approaches 90: "I felt a door opening in me and I entered the clarity of early morning." I want to stand on the prow of the ship, arms open wide, and, even if I cannot proclaim myself “king of the world,” embrace the horizon.

Of course, I know full well that the jagged jostle of an iceberg will, eventually, breech the hull. I want that “eventually” to be more eventually than the current term limit, which the Bible sets at three score plus seven and attributes to a bit of Divine jealousy tempered with irony. After noting that Adam and Eve have “become like one of us, knowing good and evil,” God shows them the Garden door, convinced that humans will poach “from the tree of life and eat, and live forever!” Still, Adam lived to be 930; his son Seth, 912; Seth’s son Enos, 905; and the record-setting Mathusale, 969. I do not wish to live that long. Just longer, a good bit longer, than three score and seven, and in good health, for the story of the unfortunate Trojan royal, Tithonus, lover of Eos, goddess of the dawn, depicts a ghastly denouement. Unaccountably, especially for a goddess, Eos neglects to include eternal youth as part of a packaged deal when she asks Zeus to grant Tithonus eternal life. The dark and chilling result of that bit of absentmindedness surpasses even H. P. Lovecraft’s most morbid nightmare: "but when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all.”

No, I do not want arrested aging. I want decelerated aging. I want aging that exits the autobahn and hits a school zone. So it is that I read with avid interest about

Resveratrol: a substance found in the skin of red grapes, it has received much press for its anti-aging effects, which are controversial in animal studies and lack scientific validation in human studies. I’m inclined to think the high speed pursuit of resveratrol as an anti-aging elixir is being conducted in a clown car. Red wine sales, however, are booming.

Telomerase: an enzyme that reconstructs telomeres, a sheath at the end of DNA thought to be involved in cellular aging. Each time a cell divides, the telomere shortens, eventually disappears, and the cell, unable to divide, dies. If telomerase had a “like” button, it would be getting repeated clicks.

SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence): research into regenerative medical procedures to repair the damage caused by age-related diseases in the human body. Kind of like a periodic checking-under-the-hood body tune-up.

Cryonics: low-temperature preservation, irreversible at present but assumed to be possible in the future when medical advances will have discovered cures for currently incurable diseases. Ted Williams is cryonically preserved. In the movie “Forever Young” (1992), Mel Gibson was successfully revived. Perhaps, given his recent escapades, he needs a recooling.

Nanorobotics: the use of tiny medical robots injected into the bloodstream for search and destroy missions targeting life-threatening organisms. A health enforcement squad, discreetly undercover, rooting out the impediments to indefinite youthfulness.

And having broached the topic of medical machinery, special mention must be made of a version of transhumanism, which predicts that, due to exponential growth in computing power, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence around 2045, at which point it will be possible to transfer human consciousness into these HAL-ed up computers and live, forever and a day, in a virtual environment. Could there be a more viscerally appalling instance of Thoreau’s concern that we are becoming the tools of our tools? Beyond the moral and ethical issues such an upload would raise lies what looks to me to be a profound category mistake: transhumanists, in thrall to the quantitative, technical wonders of computer processing, do not appear to fully understand that the very thing we cherish in ourselves and others is the qualitative, the personal idiosyncracies and particularities, the singular and irreducibly unique individualizations that lattice our identities, the feelings and faults and needs and gratifications and graces and ingenuities and plunging sadnesses and seizing joys and exuberant ricochets of creative thinking that define us. The transhumanist idolatry of the machine is, for me anyway, haywired: it pulps, pauperizes, and degrades.

One aim of aging research is to develop drugs that can reproduce the effects of dietary restriction and also of genetic alterations that slow aging. One approach could be to use drug therapy to target the nutrient-sensitive pathways that regulate aging and that seem to mediate the effects of dietary restriction on aging. The ultimate goal would be a pill that one could take regularly from midlife onward.

Though scientific data has yet to confirm its ability to extend human life, calorie restriction (CR) has proven successful in rodent and nonhuman primate studies, in some instances extending life span by 40 %. Certainly, the 2000 members of the Calorie Restriction Society, who reduce their caloric intake anywhere from 25% to 40% of bodily requirements, believe in its promise. And because a CR diet consists mostly of fruits, nuts, and vegetables, it does have some healthful secondary benefits. CR does exact a price, however; its adherents lose their libido, are perpetually cold, and they look, well, cadaverous. It impresses me as an overly punitive way to live, exhausting in its continual self-policing vigilance and colossal denial of hunger, self-punishing in its implacable refusal of the unsayable but richly delightful yesness of anything sweet or buttery or rich, anything taste-bud dizzying, dazzling, dallying. If John Calvin, that steeping tea of admonishment, were a foodie, a CR diet would be the grim and gloomy result. Why, I wonder, purposefully, willfully, carry a dietary November in our hearts? How is it that a superimposed layer of calculability wholly displaces those moments of appetitive spontaneity and impulse that round out the fully-inhabited integrity of our selves, that give our lives a melody as well as a song, an accent as well as a language? How is it that we are willing to trade in our culinary party clothes for sackcloth and ashes?

So, yes, a pill to do the distasteful, untasteful, business of CR seems to me the best of all possible worlds. And in the meantime that stretches between now and that panglossian future, those beset by longevity concerns might do well to follow the common sense (CS) plan: eat genuine, and genuinely healthy food; get some regular exercise, no matter what as long as it gets and keeps you moving; set goals, ambitious ones, be conscientious in working toward them, and, when they are achieved, make them the means of further goals; love well, and immerse yourself in a variety of communities. The CS plan is not new, is decidedly unsexy, scientifically speaking, but it does declaw the galling scratch of age. It’s a sensible plan to adopt, until the nanobots are ready to roll.

Waiting In Line

We hate to wait, and we especially hate to wait in checkout lines, especially in grocery store checkout lines. We are all allotted one and a half billion heartbeats, and we are loathe to expend more than a couple of them in checkout lines. No matter how long we have shambled through aisles and departments; no matter how long we have lingered before shelves and displays; no matter that the average wait is under 5 minutes, according to a 2007 study, and that we overestimate the wait by as much as 50%; no matter whether or not we have anything better to do, or anything at all to do; if we do not move, with gazelle-like speed, through the checkout line, the thudding kick-drum of impatience thumps within us. And, can anything be more abysmal, more an affront to all that is holy and just, than to choose a line only to see the one we ignored move faster? One need not be an evolutionary biologist to know, with the certainty of an evangelical holding four aces, that the human genome, somewhere in its tangled grammar, contains a gene whose expression is waiting irritation.

Undoubtedly, I am missing that gene, for I don’t mind waiting in checkout lines; in fact, I actually enjoy it. Whitman declared, “I witness and wait.” I witness as I wait.

I find product placement—that cynical “Oh, yeah” in response to classical economics theory of utility-maximizing, rational-choice consumerism—quite educational, a multi-course feast for the enquiring mind. From the various magazines and tabloids I learn that Elvis was abducted by aliens, Clint Eastwood is being hassled by the FBI, Nostradamus has predicted the outcome of the 2012 presidential election, the 100 prophecies that will come true before Christmas, and a potential epidemic from a new form of influenza—the snake flu. I learn the latest intelligence about Mel and Oksana or Brad and Angelina or Ashton and Demi or Jennifer and Justin or Kim and Kris or George Clooney and whoever. I learn the latest escapades, mostly tawdry, sometimes tragic, periodically inspiring, of celebrities, near-celebrities, pseudo-celebrities, and wannabe celebrities—the infidelities, the spats, the boorish behavior, the unmake-upped moments. I learn how to make a perfect pie crust, hard-boil an egg in a microwave, and keep shoelaces from unraveling. I learn the 26 ways to use vinegar, the 7 best pick-up lines, the 10 things never to say on a first date, the 3 magic moves to flatten your belly, an amazingly easy way to remove counter stains, and the 5 secrets to reducing your spouse to drooling desire. I learn about fashion and technology and home décor and fine cuisine and budget dining and medical advances. The checkout line is encyclopedic, a Harvard for the unlegacied.

And there is moral improvement to be had while waiting to check out. I look right at, I mean really regard, and then, in a burst of smug self-satisfaction, resist the farrago of sugared seductions, the candied temptations, that surround me. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, get thee behind me; Hershey’s Kisses, I will not give thee a foothold; Tootsie Roll Pops, I spurn thy allurements and cast thee aside. Who can doubt that free will exists, that resolute singleness of purpose can restrain the churning force of desire. In the humble checkout line, I find proof positive.

Perhaps most puzzling, certainly to my wife Kathy, is that, while I tend to be socially reticent, in checkout lines I become suddenly and strangely chatty. Once, to a woman behind me with a large, shockingly pink purse resting in the child’s seat of her shopping cart, I said, “That’s certainly a striking purse.” “Oh, thanks,” she said; “I bought it when I was in Memphis.” “I hope you got a chance to visit Graceland while you were there,” I replied. She smiled, and tuned the purse around. Emblazoned in rhinestones on its front was “Elvis.” “I bought it there,” she said. For the next five minutes we parsed Elvis as if he were a compound-complex sentence: his best songs, his best movies, his shopping for a pink and black suit at Bernard Lansky’s Beale Street store, his fondness for peanut butter and fried banana sandwiches, his picture with Richard Nixon, the fake FBI badge Nixon gave him in response to his request to be made an FBI agent, his incorporation of martial arts moves in the Jailhouse Rock dance sequence. We agreed that his creativity was in adapting songs, and that, in bringing black music into the mainstream, he played a small part in racial integration.

On another occasion, seeing Pop Weaver microwave popcorn among the items of the customer in front of me, I began a conversation that escalated into a friendly debate on the relative merits of microwave popcorn in general. He preferred Pop Weaver because the company’s founder, the Reverend Ira Weaver, was dedicated to providing the healthiest and best-tasting popcorn at the cheapest price. “They don’t advertise,” he said, “and they use plain brown bags. That helps keep the cost down.” I allowed that Pop Weaver was good but held out for the superior taste of Orville Redenbacher; besides, as Orville claimed in his iconic TV ads, every kernel popped. “That’s where the value comes in,” I noted; “minimal waste.” The debate ended in a draw, but we did agree that in the archipelago of satisfyingly salty-crunchy munchables, popcorn was an island of sensible snacking.

From a young checkout cashier, I discovered that she had just learned she was pregnant, that her lineman husband was home for a several-week stay, that she had pork slow-cooking at home in a crock pot, and that dinner that night would consist of shredded pork sandwiches and her favorite food, tater tots. I wanted to say I was a vegetarian and that tater tots contained enough saturated fat to clog a water main. But I didn’t. She was happy. Instead, I told her what was also true: “You know, when I was a kid, I loved tater tots. My dad said I’d turn into a tater tot. I had a nightmare about that.” She laughed. I laughed. We shared a laugh.

Individually, or even taken together, these waiting line conversations did not amount to much, and yet, they amounted to a lot. They took us out beyond the trip-wired, self-defensive perimeters behind which we tend to hunker, took us, if only momentarily, into that often unrealized common life in which we all participate. Too often, we wait impatiently, waiting for the oven timer to chime, for a leaf to fall and a flower to appear, for a meteor to rift the heavens, for our name to be called, our number to come up; waiting for what’s lying in wait to make itself known; waiting for the rapture, the quickening, the gathering of the righteous, for kingdom come that never seems to come; waiting, fist to cheek, elbow on the window sill, for something to pass by worthy of our regard before darkness falls. We wait, feeling that time has stood still, feeling suspended in it, yet all the while it tick-tocks on, as do we, always in transit, always finalizing, heart beating, blood circulating, breath pulsing in and out, growing each moment just a little bit older, time passed time past, an entropic echo, as we wait to check out. In those waiting line conversations, maybe, just maybe, the dense gravity of our minute-and-secondhandedness momentarily lightens and, as the poet Amy Clampett says, we “fall upward.”

Quoting and Paraphrasing

We quote to reproduce a source exactly and to provide the tonal core of the source’s voice or the impact of its expressive power. We paraphrase to restate that voice, that expression, in our own words, avoiding thereby the distracting iteration of quotations or the charge that we have done little more than create a string of prose beaded by someone else’s words. Most composition textbooks emphasize paraphrase and advise writers to quote sparingly. The original, the direct, is erased, to be replaced by the writer’s restatement of the original.

There are two related problems with paraphrasing. First, it is a translation, and translations never capture the original in its full integrity. The second problem lies in what Walker Percy calls “the symbolic complex,” a preformulated perception whose value lies only in the degree to which what is perceived approximates the preformulation. The danger, in short, is that paraphrase can blunt or distort the original, can chamfer or curtain its difference, can even render it mute.

I’d like to think that when we look at the things around us, when we gaze at and regard the phenomena that environ us, we have the choice to quote them or paraphrase them, to open ourselves directly to them or cast them into our own language.

My neighbor has counted every tree on his property and catalogued them by species, as if their sole value lies in their number and diversity. He has inventoried his trees, itemized and columned them in a mental ledger. They do not stand individually before him, are not palpably real and living things, have no secrets. They testify, rather, to the accumulated extent of what he owns, and in that extent he finds self-satisfaction. He does not know and, judging by his reaction to my mentioning it, is incurious about the cultural history of his trees. He does not know that oaks have been immemorially associated with strength and courage, that Socrates called oaks oracle trees, that a poultice made of oak leaves can be used to heal wounds. He does not know that maples represent balance and practicality, that elms emblemize intuition and mental strength, that lindens betoken purity and truth. No, my neighbor has paraphrased his trees, made them images of what he holds within the bounded lines he occupies. He has, in effect, made them images of himself.

I believe trees have a capacity for expression. I’d even say trees can, after a fashion, talk. As cultural ecologist David Abram asserts, trees “can seem to speak to us when they are jostled by the wind,” the “different forms of foliage,” those leafy tongues, lending them “a distinctive voice,” a particular dialect. “To be sure,” Abram says, they “do not speak in words. But neither do humans speak only in words.” Beyond the verbal, we employ, to a much larger extent than we realize, the language of bodily gesture, of pitch and tone and cadence. Linguistically, we share an affinity with trees.

If trees can talk, they can be quoted, directly. Here is what my trees say to me: “Renew yourself each year without fail; be a shading comfort and a nesting home for others; send the branches of yourself outward and upward, and in the winter, let them arch like cursive strokes across the leaden sky; let your living days ring you around and make you wise, and if not wise, then stoic, imperturbable; feel that you are deep-rooted and can withstand the beleaguering bluster of the fiercest gale; refuse to be hijacked by pieces of time; know that, like me, you cannot be shawled by your physical qualities, that you are something more, something implicit, something ineffable and undistilled; and know that that something can be listened to.” And I quote.