Life on a schedule

 The novelist Patricia Highsmith, at 21, said she’d like to write music from 20 to 30, books from 30 to 40, sculpt from 40 to 50 and paint from 50 to 60.

It reminded me of William Osler’s remark about a medical career. Osler thought that all the really good work in science was done by young people. He proposed that a person ought to study until age 25 and then research and investigate until age 40. After that, you could teach until age 60.

Osler borrowed the title from this essay from Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period. Osler was leaving Johns Hopkins, where he’d taught medicine, at 55. The theme of his talk was that people should retire before they are useless.

He suggested, tongue in cheek, that when a person turns 60, he or she should be offered a year in college to reflect about the whole experience and then be offered chloroform.

I have endured many deadly dull speeches. Osler’s strikes me as interesting. But it created a furor. The aggrieved included Trollope fans, who complained that the novelist’s views were treated badly.

To me, all the fuss misses something interesting: the notion that life could be lived on a schedule.  

• Sources and notes: Patricia Highsmith’s Diaries and Notebooks: The New York Years, 1941-1950, edited by Anna von Planta; New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2023, p. 81.

Sir William Osler,  Aequanimitas; Philadelphia: P. Blakiston’s Son & Co., 1914. 

I’m looking for a copy of Trollope’s novel to see what, exactly, he said. On critic of Osler says Trollope didn’t mention chloroform and in his fictional country where euthanasia is required a person enters college at 67 and does not come out at 68. This would be my college year.