“Mr. Raymond, I’ll need you to strip down to your underwear and put on this gown,” she said. She [...]]]> I showed up for my appointment at four o’clock. They kept me in the waiting room a little longer than usual. My favorite nurse looked apprehensive when she came to escort me back to an examining room.

“Mr. Raymond, I’ll need you to strip down to your underwear and put on this gown,” she said. She made no eye contact.

“What’s with the ‘Mister Raymond,’ Jennifer? I thought we were on a first-name basis.”

“I’m sorry, Mister— I’m sorry, Jack,” she said. “I have a lot on my mind today.”

Before I could reply, she was out the door and pulling it shut behind her. I stripped to my boxers and socks. I had been through this routine enough times that I knew I needed protection against the icy tile floor. I was willing to give up my privacy and most of my dignity, but there was no reason to put up with cold feet.

The chipper intern, Dr. Kaladjian, entered the exam room a few moments later. Was I imagining it, or did he look as if he’d just received some bad news?

“Doctor K., what is it? Jennifer’s on edge, and you look like you’re getting ready to tell me I’m dying of cancer. But I know that can’t be right, because we’ve already taken care of that one. So what is it? I’m not new to this stuff. What is it that you don’t want to tell me?”

“It’s…. I….” He let out a slow breath. “Jack, I’m not sure I can in good conscience let you go through with the next treatment.”

“What are you talking about? I’ve had the briefing. I’m looking forward to this.”

He took off his glasses, folded them, and tucked them in the breast pocket of his lab coat. “There’s more to this treatment than they’ve told you in the briefing.”

I had read the treatment plan four times, and I recited what I could remember: “Rejuvenation therapy, phase VIIIa, entails introducing additional nanodiagnostic and nanosurgical probes that will examine the patient’s brain for damage due to a variety of organic causes, then make the appropriate repairs.”

“That’s what it says, Jack, and that’s what it does,” said Dr. Kaladjian. “But I don’t know if you’ve thought of everything that it could mean. We’re going to turn loose a fresh batch of nanobots that will scour your brain looking for anything that might be impeding performance. They’ll repair faulty neurons, build new connections where old ones can’t be fixed, and carry out a dozen other tasks that would take me all day to explain to you.

“But the net result is that memories start coming back. The literature says that the effect can be disorienting for some people, but the literature wasn’t written by a subject who’s undergone the treatment. Patients tell us that the memories come fast and furious. One man called it a windfall of memories, a blessing of more recollections than you’ll know what to do with.

“But you can’t stop them coming, Jack. See, they don’t just flow in, they come flooding in, they pour in over the floodgates, they leak in under the barriers and around the walls we put up a long time ago to contain them, because nanobots don’t know the difference, really, between memories that we’ve lost by accident and the ones that we’ve chosen to bury deep in recesses of the mind somewhere. And so they unleash them all, and suddenly, the patient has to deal not only with everything that he never wanted to forget, but also with everything he never wanted to remember.

“Don’t you see? It’s an enormous risk, Jack, because you can’t know what it is that you’re digging up until it’s too late. Are you sure you want this? Are you sure you won’t just quit while you’re ahead?”

I thought for a second, and I said, “Thanks for the warning, Doctor K. Let’s get this thing started.”

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick

I changed the subject. I told her about a curious experience I’d had at the park.

“Last Thursday, I discovered a new shade of purple. I was walking past the driveway of the arboretum, and I noticed [...]]]> The other day, one of my young friends asked in a solemn tone, “Aren’t you bored after all these years?”

I changed the subject. I told her about a curious experience I’d had at the park.

“Last Thursday, I discovered a new shade of purple. I was walking past the driveway of the arboretum, and I noticed a flowerbed that had been freshly planted. The tiny clusters of blossoms were a purple that I’m sure I’ve never seen before in all my many years.”

She said, “You changed the subject. I asked you about boredom.”

I remember spending a lot of time bored when I was very young—the first couple of decades of my life. Then came what we used to call “young adulthood”—a phase of maturation when there always seemed to be so much to do, so much to learn, so much to experience, and more than enough energy for all of it. There was never time for boredom.

But for some people, boredom eventually comes back. Before the longevity therapies, boredom arrived back on the scene somewhere in the late thirties, or maybe the forties. That was when some people found it easier not to keep weighing their dreams against reality. They started looking instead for something they called “peace.” To me, that state looked more like resignation.

When my body started to wear out, my supply of physical energy couldn’t match the level of my curiosity. That’s the critical moment, the fork in the road: Do you dial back your curiosity? Or do you seek new sources of stamina? Do you challenge yourself to learn beyond what you thought was your capacity to absorb new experiences, to grow beyond your capacity to grow? Or do you begin to accept the limitations that life places on you?

Young people who haven’t paid attention to the history of the Millennials tend to suppose that our survival rate is related in some way to the initial health condition of the subject. The truth is, more than a dozen of us began treatment after the age of 80. One patient—you would recognize him today for his athletic accomplishments and his term in public office—underwent coronary-artery bypass surgery three years before he was enrolled in the trial group.

But I also knew 40-year-olds who entered the program in perfect health, only to die at the age of 110 or 120 in freak accidents or of mysterious illnesses that defied treatment. Or by their own hands. I learned to recognize a certain bored look in the eyes. I can see when someone is getting near the end.

What makes the difference? Are we genetically programmed for boredom, or curiosity, or to chart our way carefully between the two? Does each of us possess a natural orientation to take one fork in the road rather than the other? I don’t know. I like to think that when boredom presented itself to me as an option, I made a conscious choice and said, “No, I have better things to do.”

Each Millennial will give you a different answer to the question, “Aren’t you bored after all these years?”

My answer: “Last Thursday I discovered a new shade of purple.”

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick

I remember a time when I dreamed of what I could do with an extra hundred years, or two hundred, or three. I would become the world’s foremost authority on nineteenth-century French literature. I would develop the patience to cook a soufflé. [...]]]> It occurred to me today that I’m not as far along as I thought.

I remember a time when I dreamed of what I could do with an extra hundred years, or two hundred, or three. I would become the world’s foremost authority on nineteenth-century French literature. I would develop the patience to cook a soufflé. I would speak flawless Spanish with a perfect Castellaño accent…or with the accent of the aristocrats of Mexico City or Lima, or of the marketplace in San Juan.

I would learn to ski. I would win trophies at singles tennis—in my age bracket, of course, but that’s still a worthy accomplishment at 250.

I imagined that with so much time on my hands, I would develop a taste for poetry, but I have not. I’ve read all the masters in that art, and I can tell the good material from the bad, but I’ve had to concede that I just don’t have a poetic mind. Nor have I learned to paint beyond a passable competence in mimicking the work of the great Expressionists.

On the other hand, I finally worked through the topic that got the best of me in calculus when I first studied it as a small child. It took returning to school three more times—and two more failed tests—before something in my ever-evolving brain clicked into place and I understood not only how the mathematics of series and sequences works, but why I might want to know this stuff. It felt as if I had flown higher and higher until I could not only see over the wall that had stood between me and this obscure knowledge, but from my heightened perspective, I could see how small that wall really is compared to my soaring understanding.

And now I approach my millennial birthday, and I’m surprised to find how many walls remain, how many frontiers of understanding. I thought that by now I would have learned to forgive any offense. I believed that I would be unencumbered by envy, by lust, by anger—all the small-minded weaknesses that riddled my character in the seven decades I call childhood. But though I control these “vices,” understand them, tap their power and put it to good use, they are still here with me 900 years later. What vanity it was to think that we would perfect ourselves! We have only dug deeper toward the heart of our imperfection.

And what about love? What have I learned in all this time? Am I a master of that spectator sport, that science, that field of expertise, that cuisine, that art? From high in orbit, I look down and see one wall that still blocks my view. I read, I reflect, I write speculative essays, and most of all, I practice. I touch many other lives, and from time to time, I let them touch me. And call it love. (p. 379)

The first and last sentences of this text are taken from Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides. They can be found on pages 319 and 379 of the Picador trade paperback edition.

As medical knowledge—especially in the field of gerontology—moved forward in quantum leaps, [...]]]> “I don’t know whether I would have made the choice to enter the treatment trial.” Listen to you! There’s that word again, always coming up. The idea of “choice” became a defining feature of our lives in the early years of the twenty-first century.

As medical knowledge—especially in the field of gerontology—moved forward in quantum leaps, we came to understand better the role that certain choices play in our destinies. To quit smoking, to enter a treatment program for addiction, to seek an optimal weight, to enroll in the clinical trial for a radical new anti-aging therapy…but I’m getting ahead of myself. These aren’t the choices I wanted to talk about.

It’s easy to see how these “macro” choices could have a profound impact on the flow of life. You take a 10-mile bike ride every day for a year, sure, you’re going to see changes, and you’re not surprised when the river of your life is diverted around the rock in midstream—that major coronary that would otherwise have stopped you in your tracks at 63.

But it’s a mistake to think of your life as a riverbed, or at any rate, to think of it as a river that flows fast and deep. What it takes to divert this stream is so much smaller and more subtle than a boulder. It’s that Big Mac you ate this morning. That infinitesimally small, seemingly unimportant choice started a wave that will ripple into tomorrow—and tomorrow and tomorrow, as the man said. With that choice under your belt (so to speak), the next one will be easier.

And likewise with the choices that, for want of a better word, I’ll call “good.” To go to bed at a decent time, to set the alarm for seven hours, to put the day’s troubles behind you so you can renew yourself with sleep. It’s such a small thing. But one good night begets another. A habit is born out of the gradual accumulation of choices. You add up a thousand or so good nights’ sleep—high-quality sleep, with plenty of REM—and our scientists tell us that you’ll find yourself 21 days younger at the end of three years than if you hadn’t diverted your stream with that particular choice.

It doesn’t sound like much. It’s not. But in those days our knowledge progressed in surges, and forests of choices sprang up around us. Take this supplement or that one? Join a spin class or study martial arts? Eat low-fat or high-protein? Magnets or hyperbarics? Experts and specialists and charlatans competed for their 15 minutes of fame and for our attention. A new career was born: the Personal Choice Agent. I couldn’t afford to hire one, so I went back to school to become one.

It wasn’t my intent, but this sounds to me like someone from the 31st century talking to someone in the 21st century. Your impressions?

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick