Shahar Madjar, MD

Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series on Dr. Madjar’s visit to Israel.

Once every two years, I travel to my home country, Israel. I usually stay in Tel Aviv. It is almost always summer in Tel Aviv, and the days are long and hot. I enjoy sitting in a cafe along the beach and watch the waves of the Mediterranean Sea as they break on the shore.

The air carries a thin mist of steam and salt. I feel the hot sand between my toes. I order a strong, sweet coffee which the locals call Botz (mud), and a feast the locals call an Israeli Breakfast. I people-watch, and I listen: to the waves breaking in the distance, to the lifeguard calling the swimmers to stay out of the deep water and away from turbulent currents, to the sound of wooden-paddles hitting a small rubber ball in an endless paddle-ball game called Matkot.

The pairs of players, I notice, pass the ball with energy and speed, trying to disprove the rules of gravity. When they fail, when the ball falls into the sand, they sound surprised and blame each other, then, they laugh a little, and keep playing.

I also listen to conversations in the tables around me. I do not eavesdrop, but I happen to hear, bits and pieces, not whole conversations.

In my last visit to Israel, I was sitting in the cafe and I was listening. Everyone was talking about love, or food, or politics. People were saying: “It is so hot today,” or “he is so handsome,” or “this breakfast is delicious,” or “Bibi (the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu) is doing a good job.”

I listened to all of these statements and I immediately thought: Compared to what?

I asked, “Compared to what?” without criticism for my fellow human-beings who utter these statements, for I, too, have made statements unfounded in comparisons.

There were times, for example, that I have said, or rather quoted others who have said, “Life is too short to be unhappy.” Things like that.

No longer! I swore. From now on, every statement would be accompanied by a comparison. I decided to start with a simple question: Is life too short?

And I immediately followed: Too short? Too long? Compared with what?

In the Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia, published in 1939, I found a picture that is worth more than a thousand words. It is called: How Long Do Animals Live? The picture drawn by Gerd Arntz shows more than three dozens animals as they stand along a serpentine line.

They are arranged in order of their longevity. At the beginning of the line is a small drawing of an insect, a short-lived, feeble creature drawn in yellow, and farther along the line is a rat, and a mouse. They all live less than five years. Then, a hare, a toad, a fox. A lion and a woodpecker take a more fortunate position between 10 and 15 years.

And as my eyes traveled downwards along the diagram, I saw a dog, an elk, then a crocodile (with sharp teeth and no tears, the crocodile almost reaches the 25 year point). Then, a hippopotamus leads the way, just in front of a crane, and very close to 40 years. An elephant of about 60 years is then depicted in red, his tusks pointing forwards. Then a whale (70). And far down the serpent line, one can see the giant tortoise, slow but steady, it lives to 150 years.

Gerd Arntz’s picture is simple, vivid, beautiful. The animals along the serpentine line are drawn as clear, colorful silhouettes in yellow, red, black and blue (for invertebrates, mammals, birds, and other vertebrae, respectively). Looking at Gerd Arntz’s picture, the kid that lives in me is jumping with curiosity, and happiness, as if I have just discovered a new continent.

Then comes the critical me: I somberly think, for example, that grouping all insects into a tiny, yellow ‘insect’ picture is an atrocity against insects, entomologists, and anyone interested in longevity. After all, a termite queen can live to 50 years, a spider lives for 2 years, a mosquito lives just a little more than a month, flies live for 15-25 days. Even among the insects we call moths, variation rules.

Variation? I just know that the life of a moth is short, for I, too, am not afraid of Virginia Woolf. In her essay, The Death of a Moth, I found sentences like: “One was, indeed, conscious of the queer feeling of pity for him [the moth]. The possibilities of pleasure seemed that morning so enormous and so various that to have only a moth’s part in life… appeared a hard fate, and his jest in enjoying his meager opportunities to the full, pathetic.”

As she observed the moth dying, Virginia Woolf noticed that “The body relaxed, and instantly grew still. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature knew death… O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.”

For Virginia Woolf, the moth’s struggle for its life is the struggle of all living creatures, of us all, a reflection on her own life’s struggles and of her upcoming death. On March 28, 1941, Woolf filled her overcoat pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse near her home in Lewes, Sussex, England. She drowned. The Death of a Moth and Other Essays was published in 1942.

Would Virginia Woolf have written “The Death of a Moth” if she knew that the life of a moth is not as short as she had believed? The life span of the brown house moth, for example, is quite variable, and some brown house moths live, if one takes into account the incubation period and the larval stage, for up to 13 months!

As I examine Gerd Arntz’s picture, and admire its simplicity and beauty, I notice not only generalization and imprecision, but omission. I carefully look again, and nowhere along the serpentine line, is a depiction of the species to which I belong. Yes! Homo sapiens, (Latin for “wise man” although not all members equally justify the title) is completely amiss from Arntz’s How Long Do Animals Live?

In my next article, I will stop comparing apples and oranges. “Is man’s life too long?” I will ask. And I will compare man’s life in different places and times. I will conclude with a story about a dragonfly from Manistique that made me think differently about the question, is life too long?

Editor’s note: Dr. Shahar Madjar is a urologist working in several locations in the Upper Peninsula. Contact him at smadjar@yahoo.com or at DrMadjar.com.