Life Begins at 40... or 90?

Recently my brother sent me a link to an on-line questionnaire to find out how long I was going to live.

It turned out that I would live up to 94 years old, based on my lifestyle, health and eating habits.

Do I want to live that long? Today I turn 40. It is said that ‘’life begins at 40’’. But someone else also said that this only applies to men. From the questionnaire result, I will have more than half of my lifespan to go.

The protagonist in Nobel Prize laureate Garcia Marquez’s novel Memories of my Melancholy Whores said, when he fell madly in love with a young girl on his ninetieth birthday, “… when I woke alive on the first morning of my nineties in the happy bed of Delgadina, I was transfixed by the agreeable idea that life was not something that passes by like Heraclitus’ ever-changing river but a unique opportunity to turn over on the grill and keep broiling on the other side for another 90 years’’.

I am not sure if I will ever say that I want to live yet another 90, or even 40, years. And I am not sure about the transforming power of love.

The protagonist had reflected about aging and love. In his fifties he became aware that almost everybody was younger than him. (I am already feeling this now at 40!) In his sixties he felt a kind of intensity because of the suspicion that he no longer had time to make mistakes. His seventies were frightening because of a certain possibility that the decade might be the last for him.

Now, at 90, when he met someone he truly loves yet unable to consummate his love, he confronted his inner self for the first time in his life:

He discovered that his obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by himself to hide the disorder of his nature. He discovered that he is disciplined not out of virtue but as a reaction to his negligence, that he appears generous in order to conceal his meanness, and that he is punctual only to hide how little he cares about other people’s time. He became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.

According to San Francisco Chronicle book reviewer David Hellman, what Garcia Marquez seems to be getting at is, ‘’beauty is in the eye of the beholder’’. We have to find love with our own eyes, regardless of whether it is reciprocated; we are ultimately the masters of our own love, starting with the love for ourselves, which is something the protagonist discovers through Delgadina. This love is generated out of memories, nostalgia for reconciling with the past, and given a foothold in the future, which is the closest most of us will ever come to true love.