The journey to the great perhaps …

… Winning at Life—And Death - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The journalist and essayist Michael Kinsley is a modest man who would not compare himself to Cicero but who has entered this same departure lounge for elegant intellectuals. In “Old Age: A Beginner’s Guide,” he shares many modern statistics, including what he calls “the creepy one” that “the death rate due to suffocation is eight times higher for people over eighty-five than for people between the ages of sixty-five and seventy-four.” He duly notes the progress of medicine over the past millennia, most specifically in the understanding of Parkinson’s disease, with which he himself was first diagnosed in 1993 and for which Cicero knew only symptoms. But the age-old problems of old age (how good, how long, what matters?) outweigh what has changed.