Keats was twenty-five. Shelley was twenty-nine. Emily Brontë made it all the way to thirty. That old man, Lord Byron, was thirty-six when he finally kicked the can. The English have probably the most famous string of young deaths in literature. You just could not keep a Romantic writer alive well into his thirties. Not to be outdone by her former colonial rulers, America has the twenty-seven-ers—rock-and-rollers, each of whom died at that age: Jimmy Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain. Vincent van Gogh is Holland’s great contribution to this gaggle. And let us not forget Alexander the Great (thirty-three), Catullus (thirty) and Marlowe (twenty-nine).

Whenever I read about someone who is dead I always count the years between the brackets. If the sum is less than sixty-five, I feel sorry for him and lament the lost potential. Literary hagiographers ask rhetorical questions like, “What if Keats had lived forty more years?” by which they mean: “If only he had lived on, imagine what he would have done . . .” In truth, he probably would have gone through his ups and downs, soiled his reputation, offended a minor duke, and died of syphilis exiled in Paris. We know him, in part, because he did not have time really to screw up, and he died before he became old hat. This is the story of many famous young deaths, especially in the modern age: a bright flame extinguished, but not before singeing the collective memory.

Nevertheless, there is so much talk about the advantages of long life nowadays that all we can do is pity these “tragic” young deaths. Obsession with longevity is no longer merely an existential anxiety; lifespan has even become a key measure of the health of nations. We are concerned with it collectively. And since quantity of life is what we value, death is the enemy. Thus, there is no such thing as a good death at any age, much less in youth.

“I don’t want to live forever through my work; I want to live forever by not dying,” said Woody Allen on behalf of us all. He will not live forever (nor will his somewhat notable work). But he will live a lot longer than he should, and probably so long that life becomes unbearably heavy for him and those around him. (The fact that he is a lamentable human being will not help him on this front.)

We humans are not so good at living our short lives, yet we late moderns want to live forever by not dying. This is the best solution we have come up with for the problem of finite life. It involves the same type of reasoning which makes us believe that having infinite energy will solve the energy problems of a race that cannot even use limited energy well. While the wish for deathless life is a deplorable form of hubris, it would also be terribly boring. For most of us life is already so boring that to escape it we shroud ourselves perpetually in music and the banality of flashing screens. One wonders why death is not more welcomed as a novel and interesting experience—as X-treme dying, perhaps.