What I Wish I’d Known When I Was Younger

On his 70th birthday, in 1905, Mark Twain gave a speech about the secret to successful aging. (If 70 doesn’t sound aged to you, bear in mind that because of high infant-mortality rates, the average life expectancy for someone born before 1850 was less than 40.) “I have achieved my 70 years in the usual way,” he declared, according to an account in The New York Times, “by sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else.” The maxim he offered was this: “We can’t reach old age by another man’s road.”