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Jun. 16th, 2010 10:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionOh good, another one of those Depressing Middle Age Threshold Realizations just hit me.
Proud as I am that I'm on track to read 75 books this year (mostly by picking super short ones, being unconscionably blithe about content overlap, and spending a lot of time guarding a scattershot unwell loved one), it occurs to me that even at this unsustainable rate:
A) If my male-average-life-expectancy-at-birth is accurate I'll have read about 3000 more books, including rereads, before dying.
B) By retirement age I'll have read between 2000 and 2500 more.
C) By 50, when life has gone on long after the thrill of living is gone, I'll have read 1150 or so more.
Actually, that's become less depressing since I wrote it out. I've read, I don't know, c. 2000 in my time and wouldn't dream of rereading 90% of those, despite trying hard, as we all do, to pick good ones. And most of them were good, they just weren't spectacularly better than doing whatever else I could have doing at the time. But the c. 200 best were worth both the reading and the hunting through all the rest. And hypothetically I could double that in under three years, at this (unsustainable for slow-reading me) rate, assuming I'm ridiculously lucky, haven't already cleaned out all the best books, and that they're all really short.
I guess I just panicked at having any kind of quantification between me and death. Which serves me right for looking for one. Depressing Middle Aged Threshold Realization #44A: don't look for those.
I wonder if a point gets reached where list-making of any sort, past short-term to-do kinds of things, gets a bit chilling. I don't know anyone as addicted to fruitless listmaking as I am (they're so calming, especially in tense times, and they always come up a little different), but I wouldn't be surprised to find the habit falls away at not much older than I am now.
Proud as I am that I'm on track to read 75 books this year (mostly by picking super short ones, being unconscionably blithe about content overlap, and spending a lot of time guarding a scattershot unwell loved one), it occurs to me that even at this unsustainable rate:
A) If my male-average-life-expectancy-at-birth is accurate I'll have read about 3000 more books, including rereads, before dying.
B) By retirement age I'll have read between 2000 and 2500 more.
C) By 50, when life has gone on long after the thrill of living is gone, I'll have read 1150 or so more.
Actually, that's become less depressing since I wrote it out. I've read, I don't know, c. 2000 in my time and wouldn't dream of rereading 90% of those, despite trying hard, as we all do, to pick good ones. And most of them were good, they just weren't spectacularly better than doing whatever else I could have doing at the time. But the c. 200 best were worth both the reading and the hunting through all the rest. And hypothetically I could double that in under three years, at this (unsustainable for slow-reading me) rate, assuming I'm ridiculously lucky, haven't already cleaned out all the best books, and that they're all really short.
I guess I just panicked at having any kind of quantification between me and death. Which serves me right for looking for one. Depressing Middle Aged Threshold Realization #44A: don't look for those.
I wonder if a point gets reached where list-making of any sort, past short-term to-do kinds of things, gets a bit chilling. I don't know anyone as addicted to fruitless listmaking as I am (they're so calming, especially in tense times, and they always come up a little different), but I wouldn't be surprised to find the habit falls away at not much older than I am now.
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Date: 2010-06-18 03:39 am (UTC)My wife makes lists when she's stressed. I don't think she actually uses them for much. I do something similar, but the end result looks more like a flow-chart or a map of WWII Europe -- arrows, fronts, zones.
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Date: 2010-06-20 02:11 am (UTC)i've been middle-aged since i was twenty, so "don't look for those" is pretty well ingrained now. but one still finds them.
another realization: given the pace of investigation in the attempt, one is obligated to seek out reliable guides who've already made the attempts. this is not foolproof.