"Abruptly, while visiting a holding of his Clan in the Vosges, Talence Donal Farley gasped, caught at his chest, and fell dead.
"It was totally unexpected. Though he had entered his seventy-first year, he continued hale, without need of other artifice than reading glasses, and Ferlay men often survived thus into their nineties." (2, p. 110)
This passage caught my attention for two reasons. First, seventy is the Biblical age. I did not know that "...threescore years and ten..." was in a Psalm but what do I know? Secondly, I am seventy-one and, so far, have avoided reading glasses. Currently, there is a pandemic...
I have known at least two men who just dropped dead, my own father and the chaplain of a nursing home where my mother used to stay. "So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom."
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
You are more fortunate than I, in that case! From childhood I've needed spectacles for astigmatism and near sightedness, but not, till a few years ago, for reading. I've also needed magnifiers for the past several years.
I like how the Douai-Reims-Challoner renders Psalm 89.10: "The sum of our years is seventy and, if we are strong; eighty..." Strictly, the translation of the Psalms I quoted from is from the Latin version approved by Pius XII.
I don't know if medical advances can seriously extend human life spans in good health for much more than that, however. As yet we don't have the antisenescence of Anderson's Technic stories. Never mind the antithanatic of WORLD WITHOUT STARS!
Ad astra! Sean
Bad eyesight runs on my father's side of the family -- otherwise he was very healthy, living to 92 and hale up to the last few weeks. We were both born extremely short-sighted.
In 1939, he knew that the doctor inspecting Canadian army recruits in his area had gotten wise to young men memorizing the eye-chart, and also told them to go to the window and describe what was happening at the bottom of the lane his house/clinic was on.
So my father bribed a farmer to park his hay-cart there, and described it in fluent detail. Passed with 20/20 vision...
To be commended for ingenuity.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I have to admire both your father's patriotic zeal and his ingenuity! (Smiles)
Ad astra! Sean
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