Forty-Three (How I'm Living Now)

Today, for no particular reason, I was moved to reread Harvey Pekar's classic short comics story, "I'll Be Forty-Three on Friday (How I'm Living Now)".

Since my copy is buried deep in a box, I'm fortunate that someone posted it online. As of now (no guarantee to these things, of course), you can read the entire thing here, albeit in an awkward format.

Today I Am (Well It's My Birthday Too Yeah)

"Good morning," said Deep Thought at last.
"Er ... good morning, O Deep Thought," said Loonquawl nervously, "do you have ... er, that is ..."
"An answer for you?" interrupted Deep Thought majestically. "Yes, I have."
The two men shivered with expectancy. Their waiting had not been in vain.
"There really is one?" breathed Phouchg.
"There really is one," confirmed Deep Thought.
"To Everything? To the great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything?"
"Yes."
Both of the men had been trained for this moment, their lives had been a preparation for it, they had been selected at birth as those who would witness the answer, but even so they found themselves gasping and squirming like excited children.
"And you're ready to give it to us?" urged Loonquawl.
"I am."
"Now?"
"Now," said Deep Thought.
They both licked their dry lips.
"Though I don't think," added Deep Thought, "that you're going to like it."
"Doesn't matter!" said Phouchg. "We must know it! Now!"
"Now?" inquired Deep Thought.
"Yes! Now..."
"All right," said the computer, and settled into silence again.  The two men fidgeted.  The tension was unbearable.
"You're really not going to like it," observed Deep Thought.
"Tell us!"
"All right," said Deep Thought. "The Answer to the Great Question ..."
"Yes ... !"
"Of Life, the Universe and Everything ..." said Deep Thought.
"Yes ... !"
"Is ... " said Deep Thought, and paused.
"Yes ... !"
"Is ... "
"Yes ... !!! ... ?"
"Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Chapter 27

In fact it was simply chosen because it was a completely ordinary number, a number not just divisible by two but also by six and seven. In fact it's the sort of number you could, without any fear, introduce to your parents.

-- Douglas Adams (quoted in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Original Radio Script)

At this moment the King, who had been for some time busily writing in his note-book, cackled out `Silence!' and read out from his book, `Rule Forty-two. ALL PERSONS MORE THAN A MILE HIGH TO LEAVE THE COURT.'
Everybody looked at Alice.
`I'M not a mile high,' said Alice.
`You are,' said the King.
`Nearly two miles high,' added the Queen.
`Well, I shan't go, at any rate,' said Alice: `besides, that's not a regular rule: you invented it just now.'
`It's the oldest rule in the book,' said the King.
`Then it ought to be Number One,' said Alice.

-- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 12.

The helmsman used to stand by with tears in his eyes; he knew it was all wrong, but alas! Rule 42 of the Code, "No one shall speak to the Man at the Helm," had been completed by the Bellman himself with the words "and the Man at the Helm shall speak to no one." So remonstrance was impossible, and no steering could be done till the next varnishing day. During these bewildering intervals the ship usually sailed backwards.

-- Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, Preface

 

42 is the 5th Catalan number.

-- What's special about this number?

The Catalan numbers (1, 2, 5, 14, 42, 132, 429, 1430, 4862, 16796, 58786, 208012, 742900, 2674440, 9694845, ...), named after Eugène Charles Catalan (1814--1894), arise in a number of problems in combinatorics.... Among other things, the Catalan numbers describe the number of ways a polygon with n+2 sides can be cut into n triangles, the number of ways in which parentheses can be placed in a sequence of numbers to be multiplied, two at a time; the number of rooted, trivalent trees with n+1 nodes; and the number of paths of length 2n through an n-by-n grid that do not rise above the main diagonal.

-- Source

Time is so short and I’m sure
There must be something more

-- Coldplay, "42"

For more see here, here, here, here and here.

40

I am. Today. 'cause it's my birthday. Happy birthday to me.

John Lennon once said that "God is a concept by which we measure our pain". I think distress about aging is a concept by which we measure our happiness about how our lives have gone. If we have lived the lives we wished to, the lives we feel we were born to live, then aging can be readily and gracefully incorporated into a narrative of our own lives and selves. Birthdays are perfectly happy, about nothing but cake. If not --

I'm not feeling very graceful today.

They say "life begins at 40" -- one of those appallingly kitschy, platitudinous lies that people tell us (or we tell ourselves) to reconcile ourselves to unavoidable bitterness: seeing a skull as a smiley-face grin. But like many lies, this one contains a germ of truth: that life is not over at 40. And that life, while alive, can renew itself. Can change course.

"The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats." - Thoreau

And yes: I feel, strongly, the dark feeling that this, too, is a kitschy, platitudinous lie -- a slightly better version than the previous, but nothing more. More sophisticated propaganda to let us sleep the night. Seeing a skull as a Mona Lisa smile.

But here, I think, is where the wisdom of (a secularized version of) Pascal's Wager comes in. If it is indeed too late, but we assume it is not, what have we lost? Nothing. But if it is not too late, and we assume it is, we have lost everything. In this, the stakes are what matter. Perhaps willing will make it so.

"The desire for a certain kind of truth here brings about that special truth’s existence; and so it is in innumerable cases of other sorts. Who gains promotions, boons, appointments, but the man in whose life they are seen to play the part of live hypotheses, who discounts them, sacrifices other things for their sake before they have come, and takes risks for them in advance? His faith acts on the powers above him as a claim, and creates its own verification." -- James

At the very least, it will go better believing this.

So I'll try again. To fail better, if naught else.

What else is there?

Happy birthday to everyone, whether it's your birthday or not. Pretend it is today. That's my birthday present to you. And you have to take it, as a birthday present to me.

So happy birthday. To you. Today. Right now.

How does it feel to be 40?

"I'm thirty-seven, I'm not old"

Today, I'm thirty-seven (I'm not old).

Happy birthday to me!

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

Those words comprise the first line of Dante's Inferno, and mean (in Allen Mandelbaum's translation) "When I had journeyed half of our life's way". Since Psalm 90:10 says that "the days of our years are threescore years and ten", this has always been interpreted as meaning that Dante was 35 years old (and that the poem took place, therefore, in the year 1300). 35: "half of our life's way" according to David and Dante, two reputable sources.

Today is my thirty-fifth birthday.

Now, even Psalm 90:10 acknowledges the possibility that they might "by reason of strength... be fourscore years". And, of course, the psalmist was writing before modern medicine. Yet even if one goes by Genesis 6:3 ("his days shall be an hundred and twenty years") -- as, for instance, Moses is said to have done; something which I certainly hope (kenina hara!) to achieve -- still one must admit that even so life "is soon cut off, and we fly away."

I suppose this is all just to say that I'm feeling a bit melancholy. Afraid that, like Dante,

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita
("I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray")

-- and feeling also that

Io non so ben ridir com' i' v'intrai,
tant' era pien di sonno a quel punto
che la verace via abbandonai.
("I cannot clearly say how I had entered
the wood; I was so full of sleep just at
the point where I abandoned the true path.")

Perhaps such feelings are par for the course on "major" birthdays -- defined, due to our counting system, as those divisible by five.

And of course, at the end of the day, I know what the answer to such feelings are -- the only answer that there can be: the answer found in another, older poet (well, older than Dante: not the Psalmist), the odes of Horace: "carpe diem" -- "seize the day".

What else is there?

(Update:)

You say it's your birthday
Well it's my birthday too, yeah...
-- Lennon/McCartney

On a cheerier note, very happy returns to my fellow birthday celebrants: P. Z. Myers, Hayden Bock, Jason Bock (who shares my precise birthday, i.e. not just March 9 but 1971 as well) -- and, heck, all the famous ones too.