The time between the holidays is odd. You wake up the day after Christmas and it’s all over except the returns. There’s a morning-after sadness, the hangover that follows a binge on sentimentality and anxiety and, yes, genuine good cheer toward men. You’ve kissed all the cheeks and patted the backs and now we all need to go back to being unrepentantly self-serving.
It’s a letdown.
And then comes New Year’s Eve, which means it’s time to put away last year’s flubs and disappointments and focus on the glorious potential of tomorrow, which is a meaningful proposition if you’re 29. If you’re multiple decades older, there’s no assurance that tomorrow holds any potential, and you have even less confidence that whatever potential there is will be glorious. Rosy dawns belong to the young.
But suppose science could unlock a secret of nature that would let old people renew themselves? No way, you say, paraphrasing Mellencamp, there ain’t no science like that. But there is. There is a biological model for continuous renewal. The New York Times had a long article about it last month.
Unfortunately, the biological model is a jellyfish. And it doesn’t renew itself in the way you want, where you stay who you are but live forever. A scientist in the article likens the jellyfish to “a butterfly that, instead of dying, turns back into a caterpillar.” Or a chicken that becomes an egg.
Or (here’s the part where the imagery gets clumsy) like you turning back into a fetus.
It’s easier to understand like this: it’s as if the jellyfish clones itself, over and over. So not a fountain of perpetual youth, exactly. And because this particular species is highly adaptable, there is an unfortunate side effect, which is global domination: “The jellyfish seems able to survive, and proliferate, in every ocean in the world. It is possible to imagine a distant future in which most other species of life are extinct but the ocean will consist overwhelmingly of immortal jellyfish, a great gelatin consciousness everlasting.”
But still, it’s interesting. And it seems to suggest we have things to learn about extending our time on this sweet earth. Where the days are getting longer. And there are still a few cookies left in the jar. And the radio stations have stopped that unceasing Christmas music.
Photo: Old Parisian enjoying a dinner and a toast, Paris, 2008. By Jorge Royan, via Wikimedia Commons.
