By my reckoning, I must be the healthiest person in the country. Brisk 10-minute walk a day? Tick. Two glasses of red wine every evening? Tick. (And if two glasses are good, only imagine the benefits that accrue to me from five.) Four cups of coffee a day? Tick. No smoking? Tick. No recreational drugs? Tick. Sunscreening? Tick. Statins? Tick. More than five hours’ sleep? Tick. More than six hours’ sleep? Tick. Emotional agility: as, for example, overcoming negative emotions by welcoming them with self-compassion? Tick. Porridge? Tick. Porridge and berries? Tick, tick. Cheese (I was once off it to avoid fat, now I’m on it again for protein, calcium and vitamins A and B12)? Tick. Not wearing Lycra? Tick. (I’m not sure whether I shouldn’t be wearing Lycra for health or for fashion reasons, so I’m not wearing it for both. In which case, make that another double tick.)
So why aren’t I feeling well? Could it be that some people are simply not fashioned to feel well no matter how many boxes they tick? There’s a presumption in the health industry that all any of us wants is to get ourselves into shape and live for ever. We are shepherded into blooming longevity, and before we are able to ask ourselves if we wouldn’t rather burn with Walter Pater’s “hard, gem-like flame” and then go out early, we find ourselves 110, unable to remember our name.
Poets are less sanguine about the virtues of durability. “It is not growing like a tree/In bulk doth make Man better be,” wrote Ben Jonson. “A lily of a day/Is fairer far in May,/Although it fall and die that night… And in short measures life may perfect be.”
It’s poets, of course, to whom we turn when we want examples of life perfected in short measures. In Deaths Of The Poets, published earlier this year, Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley argue that in the popular imagination, a dissolute life culminating in an early and ideally messy death has become a precondition of poetic genius. Keats, who was gone in a moment, had the daemon; Wordsworth, who dragged on his life into dull respectability and probably rationed his alcohol intake, did not. What fascinates me is how much work those short-lived poets produce. Does genius, recognising itself to be a “lily of a day”, know it must get a move on? Is genius in a rush because it’s intrinsically morbid?
Meanwhile, the rest of us go on ticking boxes. Maybe the other side of genius indifferent to its health is mundanity taking its statins. If we can’t be a lily, we have to settle for being a tree.
