OxBlog

Wednesday, March 03, 2004

# Posted 4:32 AM by Patrick Belton  

DO YOU SEEK HAPPY AND LONG LIFE, and to live, with the psalmist, to see the children of your children and (if you do really well...) peace upon Jerusalem? If so, then you should read my mother-in-law's piece:
Ninety percent of the most cheerful quarter of the nuns [as determined by psychologists coding diary-style essays the aforementioned nuns wrote in 1932] turned out to be alive at age 85 compared to only 34 percent of the least cheerful quarter.

...the nuns in this study lived very similar lives.  They ate the same kind of food. They didn't smoke or drink or use drugs or get sexually transmitted diseases [thanks, Mom].  They didn't have husbands or children. They had the same access to good medical care. 
And if instead you want a different (and more Protestant) perspective, go to Kierkegaard: "Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate." Either/Or, vol. 1, sct. 1 (1843, trans. 1987).
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