Travels with Epicurus by Daniel Klein Page A

happiest life is free from self-imposed demands of commerce and politics strikes me anew. The “mad master” of “making it” has finally released me. I can savor the privilege of having lived to an old age. I am too old to die young.
    That word, “privilege,” has a special resonance for me. When my father-in-law, Jan Vuijst, a Dutch Reformed minister, was on his deathbed, I had a deeply intimate conversation with him—as it turned out, my last conversation with him. He said to me, “It was a privilege to have lived.” The soulful gratitude of that simple statement will never leave me.
    ON THE FOLLY OF DENYING PLEASURE IN OLD AGE
    As it happens, smoking brings me pleasure and, at times like this, atop my granite roost on the Vlihos road,
great
pleasure. For that matter, so does a cheeseburger with a side of french fries and some mayonnaise in which to dip them. No doubt about it, these pleasures are bad for my health—very bad. I also have no doubt that a dedicated forever youngster forsakes these pleasures for this very reason; he has devoted himself to good health habits, especially now that he is in his midseventies
.
Yes, I can easily imagine him jogging past me, and I readily admit that he may take pleasure in his jog, not the least of which is the feeling of youthful vigor it yields to him. To each his own. But I do have to say that I am really enjoying this cigarette.
    Perhaps I am guilty of some fuzzy arithmetic myself, but I have to wonder if the forever youngster’s scrupulous health habits and the self-deprivations they undoubtedly involve will add an appreciable number of years to his robust old age or just prolong his
old
old age of merciless decay. Impossible to predict. But I am still left with the question of how many pleasures I am willing to forgo, never to enjoy again, in the name of longevity. If not these pleasures now, when? In the do-not-resuscitate ward of the
old
old folks’ home?
    Corny old joke: An elderly man and his wife die in an airplane accident and up go to heaven. An angel welcomes them and starts showing them around. The man gets hungry and asks if they may get something to eat. The angel points to a lavish buffet of pâtés, cheeses, ribbed steaks, and creamy desserts and says, “Sure, help yourself. You can eat as much as you like and you don’t need to have any health concerns.” As they walk up to the buffet, the husband looks at his wife and says, “You know, Gladys, if you hadn’t made me eat that revolting oat bran every morning, I could have had this ten years ago!”
    With a few adjustments, this could be a gag about the pleasures available in old age rather than in heaven.
    ON MODERATION IN ALL THINGS
    An overriding theme in Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics
is the virtue of moderation in all things, the golden mean between ex­cessiveness and insufficiency. As an example, Aristotle cites the virtue of courage: too much of it results in recklessness, too little in cowardice. Find the middle ground, he advises us; it makes for an all-around better life. I particularly like the idea that Aristotle ties this virtue in human behavior to an aesthetic ideal: there is something pleasing and beautiful about moderate behavior just as there is something pleasing and beautiful in an artfully proportioned object like an isosceles triangle or a well-balanced piece of architecture. Beauty is equilibrium, and equilibrium is beauty.
    Like Epicurus, Aristotle has also had an influence on modern Greeks. A large proportion of them eat fatty meats, drink alcohol, and smoke cigarettes, but for the most part they enjoy these pleasures in moderation. Yes, they may choose to smoke a cigarette or two at the end of a long meal, but they don’t ­anxiously puff on cigarettes all day long or enlist in a stressful behavior-modification program to cease smoking altogether. It is little wonder that the Greeks are among the