|
 oday
I got an e-mail from my rabbi, reflecting on the grotesqueries of
September 11 and citing Auden's poem "Musee des Beaux Arts" about
the strange juxtaposition, characteristic of human life, of the
tragic and the mundane.
Auden writes of a Brueghel
painting, "The Fall of Icarus." The painting has the youth Icarus
falling into the sea, his wings melted, while on the shore a plowman
plows and on the water's horizon a ship sails as if nothing extraordinary
had happened. Suffering takes place "While someone else is eating
or opening a window or just walking dully along;/[While] the dogs
go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse scratches its
innocent behind on a tree."
Auden means that events
of profound terribleness don't change the world as it goes about
the course of its normal existence: People working, people sleeping,
people getting married. Was he right?
Actually, I've been
wondering about that last one. We've heard again and again that
the World Trade Center's vanishing will change American life in
very practical ways. Obviously it will be harder to check your bags
at the airport, but I'd suggest that other things may change that
are less obvious. Take the age at which Americans get married.
The day after the disaster
I called a college classmate in New York. He had volunteered as
a poll watcher in the mayoral primary that morning in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
When the disaster happened, the primary was cancelled and the subways
shut down; so he had to walk the 10 miles from there to the Upper
West Side. On the march from Brooklyn to Manhattan, even while bumping
into friends here and there, he told me, "I felt so lonely."
He explained that this
was because, for all the lively social existence he has cultivated,
like so many unmarried people he is basically alone. He's 35 years
old and, like much of our sociological cohort of big-city yuppies
with fancy college degrees, he spent his twenties and early thirties
messing around — "dating." Somehow the catastrophic loss of
life brought home to him his sheer aloneness. And he offered an
interesting observation: that this may change the way people like
him (and like me before I married at 34) think about getting married.
Consider: The median
age at which Americans marry has been edging upward for decades.
In 1964 the typical American man got married at 22, the American
woman at 20. In 2000, the man got married at 27, the woman at 25.
But these numbers mask the reality that in Fly Over America people
still get married young. It's in cities like New York, Los Angeles,
and Washington, D.C., that smart, hip folks don't start thinking
about matrimony till they hit 30.
There are many reasons
for this but one can be surmised from a glance at an actuarial table.
If a guy like my friend lives healthily, he can expect to live to
be 80 or 90 years old, at least. This is unlike his father or grandfather,
whose expectations of longevity were more modest. If you expect
to live eight decades, it costs you nothing to delay marriage. Thus
as life expectancy climbed, so did the age at which we get married.
Then the World Trade
Center imploded. From now on, sudden violent death is a consideration.
You may be perfectly healthy, but then an airliner rams into your
office building. Or, next time perhaps, a terrorist lights off a
nuclear bomb in Midtown.
"My dad got married
at 25," my friend said. "At my age, 35, he already had three kids."
That is to say, his father at my friend's current age had already
had a good taste of those things that make life meaningful: marriage,
children. If the father had died violently at 35, he at least could
have said to himself: I didn't miss out on anything important.
Not so with my friend,
and many, many of our classmates. For such people, to die at 35
is to die absurd: having spent 15 years after college acting out
the fantasies of adolescence, leaving behind nothing of permanent
significance.
It may be that some
of our peers will come to see this as my friend does, and reassess
the life choices we have made up to now. If so then in cities like
New York and Los Angeles — where the next terrorist assault
will take place if America doesn't stamp out the threat — I
advise you to watch the figures for median marrying age in years
to come. See if they don't rise.
|
