I read or heard somewhere that, for those beyond a certain age, normal walking pace is an amazingly accurate gauge of life expectancy: the faster, the longer. I'm skeptical. Is arthritis of the knee life-threatening? Of course, in a complex system, with lots of interacting causes and effects, things might all work out in a way that sends arthritic creepers to their graves. Maybe they walk less, eat more, get fat, and croak at age 69, whereas, without the arthritis, they were death-stamped for 83.
There's another kind of death that is not foretold by a slow gait. It's the kind suggested by Keats's phrase, "living posthumously." A sure sign of this condition, I believe, is the evident compulsion to complain about the young, the way in which the next generation is rude, soft, ignorant, tasteless, lazy, what you will. Why do people, starting it seems when they're around my current age (mid 50s), feel the need to run down the young? Possibly it's what comes out when self-respect tries to check the impulse to give up. It should be obvious there's nothing to it. Every generation's self-appointed wise old men has indulged in the pastime, and had they been right we by now would have descended below the woodchucks on the great chain of being. Instead, it's only happened to the Republican party.
The above is more or less my rambling train of thought upon having reached, in John Wain's biography of Samuel Johnson, the chapter in which James Boswell arrives upon the scene, the concluding paragraph of which reads:
Johnson liked Boswell for the same reason for which he liked Langton and Beauclerk, and he was clear-sighted about those reasons. As he put it to Boswell: 'Sir, I love the acquaintance of young people; because, in the first place, I don't like to think myself growing old. In the next place, young acquaintances must last longest, if they do last; and then, Sir, young men have more virtue than old men; they have more generous sentiments in every respect. I love the young dogs of this age.'
