Re: Raison d'être -- Raisins As An Entree ( I was terrible with languages)

[Guest guest]

Dear jwwright (have I gotten that correct?):

Longevity is simply the extension of the duration of life, as life is customarily defined. Health has a good deal more to do with the quality of your life's experience; indeed health may, in some ways, be more subjectively defined as the capacity to experience the joys possible in this life. I believe the former is more quantitative measurement, whereas the latter is definitively qualitative. Philosphically, you can think yourself into a cerebral meltdown given the hobsonian choice between a long life in a body ravaged by a chronic, debilitating disease, and a short, but healthy and pleasurable life, free of pain and sorrow. We all, at some point during the course of our lives, weigh these two extreme possibilities against eachother, not unlike the classic Tom Sawyer fantasy of visualizing the crying mourners at your own funeral service. Fortunately, for most of us, these are just intellectual exercises, and we live somewhere on the continuum where poor physical or emotional health does not preclude or steal our anticipated longevity -- others, who are not quite as fortunate, spend lonely, unimaginably tormented hours determining their own fates, or the fates of those whom they love, but cannot heal...those who have not the capacity to decide for themselves.

Faithfully,