How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions - S. S. Curry (free children's ebooks online .TXT) 📗

A noted instance is Socrates. During the great plague, when at least one-third of the population of Athens died, Socrates went about with impunity. This was no doubt due to the cheerfulness and temperance of his life. We know of his cheerfulness from accounts by Zenophon and Plato.

Possibly the most illustrious example, which has been recounted of the preservation of health and the prolonging of life through temperance, is Luigi Cornaro, who was born in Venice in 1464. After having, according to Gamba, wasted his youth, his health was so broken and his habits so fixed that "upon passing the age of thirty-five he had nothing left to hope for but that he might end in death the suffering of a worn-out life."

This man, by resolution and temperance, battled with his perverted habits and became strong and vigorous and happy, and lived to be over one hundred years of age. "The good old man," said Graziani, "feeling that he drew near the end, did not look upon the great transit with fear, but as though he were about to pass from one house into another. He was seated in his little bed—he used a small and very narrow one—and, at its side, was his wife, Veronica, almost his equal in years. In a clear and sonorous voice he told me why he would be able to leave this life with a valiant soul.... Feeling a little later the failure of vital force, he exclaimed, 'Glad and full of hope will I go with you, my good God!' He then composed himself; and having closed his eyes, as though about to sleep, with a slight sigh, he left us forever."

A new edition of Cornaro's discourses on the temperate life, by William F. Butler of Milwaukee, has recently been issued under the title of "The Art of Living Long." The first of these discourses was written at the age of eighty-three, the second at eighty-six, the third at ninety-one, and the fourth at ninety-five. His treatises have been popular for all these centuries.

He held that the older a man grows the wiser he becomes and the more he knows; and if he will, by temperance and regularity of life and exercise, preserve his strength, his powers of enjoyment will grow, as his own did, every year until the end.

"Men are, as a rule," says Cornaro, "very sensual and intemperate, and wish to gratify their appetites and give themselves up to the commission of innumerable disorders. When, seeing that they cannot escape suffering the unavoidable consequences of such intemperance as often as they are guilty of it, they say—by way of excuse—that it is preferable to live ten years less and to enjoy life. They do not pause to consider what immense importance ten years more of life, and especially of healthy life, possess when we have reached mature age, the time, indeed, at which men appear to the best advantage in learning and virtue—two things which can never reach their perfection except with time. To mention nothing else at present, I shall only say that, in literature and in the sciences, the majority of the best and most celebrated works we possess were written when their authors had attained ripe age, and during these same ten latter years for which some men, in order that they may gratify their appetites, say they do not care."

We see not only in this passage but in many other places evidence of the fact that Cornaro lived a cheerful, contented life. The reform was evidently not merely in his eating and drinking but fully as much in the inner thought of his life. This is shown in many passages from his discourses.

He says: "Although reason should convince them that this is the case, yet these men refuse to admit it, and pursue their usual life of disorder as heretofore. Were they to act differently, abandoning their irregular habits and adopting orderly and temperate ones, they would live to old age—as I have—in good condition. Being, by the grace of God, of so robust and perfect a constitution, they would live until they reached the age of a hundred and twenty, as history points out to us that others—born, of course, with perfect constitutions—have done, who led the temperate life.

"I am certain I, too, should live to that age had it been my good fortune to receive a similar blessing at my birth; but, because I was born with a poor constitution, I fear I shall not live much beyond a hundred years."

According to the census of the United States not one man in twenty thousand attains the age of one hundred years. If we figure out carefully from these statistics, we find the average is only about one-third of this period of life.

One of the social customs is that we must eat an extraordinary meal,—far more than we need, as if life's enjoyment depended on the low sense of taste,—as if every contract or matter of important business must have this as an introduction. Theoretically speaking, many people believe in low living and high thinking, but it is very rare that we find one who practices it.

The two simple rules of Cornaro deserve our attention: to eat only what he wanted, that is, what he actually needed for the sustenance of his body, and to eat only those things which really agreed with him, that is, those which were really helpful to the sustenance of his life. If we should consider eating merely as a means and not an end, Cornaro's idea that the normal age of a human being was one hundred and twenty years would not be such a wild dream.

Another almost universally recognized requisite is exercise in the open air, or regular, systematic, simple and vigorous activity of some kind.

The necessity of thoroughly pure air must be emphasized from first to last. Some think that the dullness felt by many people in the early morning is due to the impure air of cities, and to the failure to open windows. A lady once said to me, "When I am in the country I always sleep out of doors. Then I have not the slightest disinclination to get up. I do it as naturally and as gladly as the animals."

It is to be hoped that the rapid transit and the automobile will enable people to live farther out in the country, farther from air poisoned by smoke and gases. Even in cities, however, one may have open windows and greater circulation of air than is common.

Some have gone so far as to place exercise over against temperance in eating, saying that if you take enough exercise you may eat and drink what you please. While there is some truth in this there is really no antagonism between them; in fact, they are usually found together.

Another view almost universally advocated, is to avoid drugs. The importance of this and its union with right exercise have been demonstrated in the impressive language of fable.

"There is a story in the 'Arabian Nights' Tales'," says Addison, "of a king who had long languished under an ill habit of body, and had taken abundance of remedies to no purpose. At length, says the fable, a physician cured him by the following method: he took a hollow ball of wood, and filled it with several drugs; after which he closed it up so carefully that nothing appeared. He likewise took a mallet, and, after having hollowed the handle and that part which strikes the ball, he inclosed in them several drugs after the same manner as in the ball itself. He then ordered the sultan, who was his patient, to exercise himself early in the morning with these rightly prepared instruments, till such time as he should sweat; when, as the story goes, the virtue of the medicaments perspiring through the wood, had so good an influence on the sultan's constitution, that they cured him of an indisposition which all the compositions he had taken inwardly had not been able to remove.

"This Eastern allegory is finely contrived to show us how beneficial bodily labor is to health, and that exercise is the most effectual physic."

Another illustration is furnished us by Sir William Temple:—

"I know not," he says, "whether some desperate degrees of abstinence would not have the same effect upon other men, as they had upon Atticus; who, weary of his life as well as his physicians by long and cruel pains of a dropsical gout, and despairing of any cure, resolved by degrees to starve himself to death; and went so far, that the physicians found he had ended his disease instead of his life."

Of all the methods advocated, possibly one of the most universally recognized is joyousness,—a hopeful attitude toward life, a cheerful, kindly relationship with one's kind.

According to Galen, Æsculapius wrote comic songs to promote circulation in his patients.

"A physician," says Hippocrates, "should have a certain ready wit, for sadness hinders both the well and the sick."

We know, too, that Apollo was not only the god of music and poetry but also of medicine. The poet, John Armstrong, has explained this: