One prescription for longevity, according to someone (Lewis Thomas?), is to contract a chronic disease and then take good care of it. The idea is that the ill are less apt to smoke, or drink and drive, or drive fast without seat belts, or have unprotected sex with lots of partners, and are as a result likely to live, with an assist from modern medicine, all the days that their one piece of bad luck allows. There are other upsides to illness. For example, it is conducive to indoor pursuits. I'd been making my way through Mansfield Park at the rate of two chapters per day, but, admitted to the hospital for a night and two days, I was through the last hundred pages in a single, sick-aided bound.
I have to report that the novel does not work on me in the way I imagine Jane Austen intended. I am not able to regard amateur theatricals as a gateway to depravity, or the high-spirited Crawford siblings as blackguards, or the adulterous affair of a family member as an occasion for personal humiliation and self-lacerating woe. But what the hell? Part of "the experience of literature" must be the broadening exposure to different outlooks. Tolstoy was hysterical on the same general topics and he is probably one of the handful of people in the history of the world who was an even greater novelist than she.