Five hundred years from now, people will live until they are, say, 250 years old before they die of natural causes. They could, of course, still die in accidents or wars, but few people will want to risk their extended lives to take part in auto races and most people will travel by other means than autos to get to work. Wars between people will die out for the same reason, though there would still be wars with extraterrestrials, in which case people will die to protect the species against the diaphanous fog coming out of a remote star. It will be, as the Israelis say, an existential matter.

Five hundred years into the future is not really that long a time away. I, for one, think it means I myself miss only by a smidgeon the cutoff point to significantly extended life. It has been about five hundred years since Cortez conquered Mexico and Luther started the Reformation. Those events and the evolution of social life since are readily grasped within our imagination-- which is true, I think, of all the events since recorded history began. It is not hard to imagine living in the Athens of Socrates.

But scholars five hundred years in the future, I imagine, will have a hard time reconstructing the mentality of people who were as short lived as you and I. Among other things, they will notice what will seem to them (and seems to me) the incredible bravery of people who have to confront such a short mortality. How could people doomed so quickly to die manage to carry out lives that were not full of despair? It is all like what happens in Charlotte's Web where the spider, out of a totally good nature, devotes the one summer of its life to helping a pig grow up, as if people don't really devote a great many of their limited number of summers to help their own children grow up. How to grasp the moral complexity of that? People find a way to find it satisfying to devote the best years of their lives to raising children, redefining a temporary burden which does have some satisfactions with a purpose for an entire life. Don't many people living now see child rearing in that way?

The historical records will not be very good for exploring these moral paradoxes. Historians today rummage through diaries to establish that Victorian parents felt great loss at the death of a child, which was then a frequent occurrence, the historians feeling marvel at the fact that people back then grieved for every death, even as we would in the present day when the death of a child is far more rare and would therefore seem more a catastrophe. I am not so sure the historians are doing justice to the matter of how death was perceived back then. Did not people expect some of their children to be gathered in, just as parents of in vitro fertilized fetuses now expect to have to harvest only some of them, sacrificing the others so that the chosen few will live? And do we do much to assess what are the spiritual damages done to people who have put themselves through that process?

There will be many other moral paradoxes of the present that will be explored in the future. As Rod Serling would say, I offer up, as a case in point, one Felix Brinkmann, 90 years old, long time resident of Manhattan, Auschwitz survivor, owner in the Seventies of a fancy Midtown club, who was murdered a few weeks ago in the commission of a robbery probably committed with the assistance of a much younger woman he was seeing. A son confirmed that Mr. Brinkmann remained sexually active. A friend, who had for years been regaled with stories Brinkmann told him of the young Brinkmann having escaped the gas chambers five times, believed that Brinkmann must have refused to cooperate in opening a safe he had in his apartment. After what he had been through, his friend believed, Brinkmann was not going to give up what he had earned to some young punk.

I imagine a god or a spirit visiting Brinkmann in Auschwitz and saying to him: you may or may not survive this, but if you do you will live to be murdered at ninety as a result of a scheming woman you had been dating. Let us say the alternative was put as a choice: you can either die a martyr or live to be murdered at ninety etc. Obviously he would choose the latter. What Jew wants to be a martyr? It is not like Achilles choosing between dying young and dying unknown. Now that is a choice because there is much to be said for both alternatives.

What would be striking about such a visitation and is striking about the story without the visitation is how generous fate was with Brinkmann. He had more than people are entitled to, not only as to sex but as to age. Let us say he had been killed in a robbery that had taken place when he was fifty and under the same circumstances. Then it would have been merely sad, a man who should have known better taken advantage of by a woman who would still have been much too young for him and so in the relationship for some ulterior motive such as taking advantage of a gullible man. But the age is so much older than that that Brinkmann is a hero. He bespeaks the virility of the old rather than the concupiscence of those not so old as well as for having gone on with his life with vigor so late into his life. If he had been expected to live to two hundred and fifty, then it would have been as if this happened to him sometime in his maturity when the story would have been a tribute to the self serving nature of men and women rather than the story of how men can continue to be outgoing for longer than expected.

So stories are time sensitive; they depend on how long a life is allocated. Extending meaningful life to the age of 250 is important because living so much longer changes the terms. A person isn't just someone who has used up a certain portion of life, however long life is at that time. A person is someone for whom death is sufficiently remote that other kinds of choices can be made and other meanings found. Perhaps that means that people will develop new careers every century, which means going back to school and so repeating what is now considered a single life cycle. Perhaps it will mean taking one's time to sow many wild oats and so marriage becomes less and less viable, people never able to be sure when they would be rid of their spouses, just the opposite of the situation in the Middle Ages when a man could be pretty sure he would outlive a wife who was likely as not to die while giving birth. Perhaps it will mean people are less ambitious to succeed because they have time enough to get on with a successful career should they ever decide to pursue one. Or perhaps it will mean people are more ambitious because they have enough time to learn enough so that they can become really good philosophers or historians, no longer taken in by the intellectual fads of their youth, not dying just when they get to be good at their craft.

But back in the present, the age context determines the meaning of the Brinkmann story. Under the present dispensation, Brinkmann's story is a testament to just how long people can escape death and also how to flaunt death by continuing the activity which John Updike regarded as what makes people remember what is worthwhile about life. And, sooner or later, one has to face death and so to come to it in a most opportune circumstance is a sign of a life well led.