The 40s is the decade in which role-play starts to tip into an eventual reversal: parents begin to become frailer and more needy, heading towards what must be a very frustrating second childhood in which their bodies betray a lifetime of intelligence, experience and will, and we start to take care of them. As we watch this, those of us in our 40s realise with horror that one day, not all that long from now, we will wake up to a world in which there are no grown-ups left. And then what?
Okay, that's not strictly true. There will still be grown-ups - the problem is that they will be us. We won't have anyone older to consult, so we'll have to look to each other to deal with our nameless fears. Are you in your early 40s? Look around at your peers and tell me if you don't think, "Oh god, I'm screwed."
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By the same token, when the rapidly depreciating elders look to each other and find all their peers consumed by their own creeping senescence, I imagine they are forced to look to their kids, meaning us. Are you a rapidly depreciating elder? Look around at us, and tell me if you don't think, "Oh god, I'm screwed." I know that when I extrapolate this timeline to a few decades from now, I look at the kids who are now in college, and think, "Oh god, I'm screwed."
In other words, nobody knows a thing about mortality, nobody has a single good answer or any good guidance to offer at all, and the greatest fraud every generation perpetrates upon the next is to let younger people think (as they are naturally wont to do) that the elders are somehow in charge, that they know what's what, and that every thing will be just fine. Nobody has a clue, which is why the world is always going to hell in a handbasket.
There's this scene in the animated movie Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, where Sid the sloth is on a slab of rock floating in a river of burning lava that ends in a huge fiery waterfall. By this point we're all wildly attached to the sloth, and cannot bend our minds around the idea that he's going over the lip of the waterfall to his death - alone, at that. There seems no way out. But this is a cartoon, and must reinforce the idea that every thing will be just fine, so he's scooped up in the nick of time by two possums and a one-eyed weasel riding on a Jurassic-era flying creature. Oddly it was this scene, rather than any book, movie or conversation, that best illustrated to me the vastly interesting fact that we are all on that river, in which the current only flows one way, all headed to that waterfall, and there's no cowboy on a Harpactognathus to come and rescue us, and we never talk about it.
Or almost never. We talk about one part of it all the time. We fight, dispossess, execute, conquer, terrorise, enslave, cheat and kill one another over it all the time. That one part is the rescue. Whether you believe in Yama, Ram, Jesus, Allah, or two possums and a one-eyed weasel riding on a Jurassic-era flying creature - they're all versions of the same everything-will-be-just-fine rescue story, the story that says there's a story beyond the lip of the fiery waterfall.
Our resistance to the idea of death, expressed in the body as adrenaline, and in the mind as fear, is a hard-wired biological response, and stands us in good stead. When the previous generation yields place to us on the frontlines, a rescue story will start to look pretty appealing, even to the atheists among us. But while heading towards the waterfall on that single-direction current may not be as cute as a cartoon, you've got to admit, it's a zinger of a mystery novel to which every reader writes his or her own end.