Concept

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

– William Shakespeare, As You Like It (Act II Scene vii)

You, as you sit here and listen, are going on in time. From minute to minute your existence is falling away from your breathing side. For your existence is, in a way, a finite totality which can be computed. There are 60 minutes to an hour, 24 hours to a day, 365 days to a year, and perhaps 70 years to an existence. You are very well aware of all this. But have any of you ever stopped to think that this gives you a mere 36, 729, 000 minutes in which to exist, a sum which is melting away as I speak, like ice under a terrible sun!

– Delmore Schwartz, ‘The Commencement Day Address’

The days of our years are threescore years and ten…

– King James Bible, Psalm 90:10

 

Three Score & Ten, or: Like Ice Under a Terrible Sun is an anthology of literary quotes illustrating each year of life from conception to death. Its aim is to view the passage of time through the prism of literature by using a different male and female character for each year, in order to detail the minuscule changes wrought upon our bodies and minds as consciousness blooms, experiences accrue, hopes rise and fall, options expand and then retract.

Three Score & Ten has been over a decade in the making and when compiling it I found it essential to give myself Some Rules.

Some Rules

• All the characters must be fictional.
• I can only use each character once (so if a character is 15 at the start of the novel and 30 at the end he/she can only represent one of those ages).
• Only one male and one female quote for each age.
• The quote has to actually say how old the character is – and has to reveal something about that age, either psychologically,  physically, or, ideally, both
• Each quote should be able to stand alone and make sense to a reader without prior knowledge to the book.
• I have to have read and finished the book I’m quoting from.

However, during that first Lockdown, with concentration shot and data inputting the only thing I was capable of, I had a change of heart regarding Some Rules and decided to relax them a little. Not all of them, mind (integrity-wise I still have to have actually read the work I’m quoting from and the quote still has to be pertinent and work as a stand alone), but I thought it might be interesting to expand the site to include all of my research. This allows for multiple entries for each age and even for individual characters to feature more than once if they happen to age over the course of a novel or series of novels. For example, you can now trace the ageing of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders from eight year old girl to sixty-nine year old woman, or the peculiar progress of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando from a thirty-year old man to a thirty-six year old woman.

For those mourning (ahem) the breakdown of the original Some Rules, rest assured: there is still a primary male and female entry for each age, as displayed on the home page, which still strictly adheres to the original Some Rules. The difference being that you are now able to view all the other characters found over the course of my reading displayed as sub-entries below the main entry. So, while, say, Angela Carter’s Dora Chance remains the primary Seventeen Year Old Female, all the other female seventeen year olds are now displayed beneath her. And all the seventeen year old males are displayed beneath Graham Greene’s Pinkie. And if you want to see all the male and female seventeen year old entries together in one place, just click on the 17 tag and bingo!

Regarding Death I’ve decided – for the time being, at least – to stick to “natural” deaths due to old age and/or illness, rather than enter the murky world of murder, suicide, tragic accidents of the “picnic, lightning” variety, etc. This stance may well change over time. But, for now, reader beware: this whole site is very spoiler-heavy, and Death probably the spoileriest and heaviest.

All of which means that Three Score & Ten is now, more than previously, fated to be forever unfinished. And has gone from being a site I considered fairly comprehensive to being horribly incomplete and something I imagine I’ll still be adding to on my deathbed.  In light of this, I’ve now added a subscribe function to the site. This will ensure that you receive notification whenever a new entry is added. I’ll try to keep them as interesting as possible.

I’d also like to mention here that none of these changes to Three Score & Ten would have been possible without the wisdom and patience of site-designer, Mat Martin – whose expertise in making the site (I think) so user-friendly has been  invaluable. If you’re looking to put together a website that actually does what you want it do and looks pretty damn great while it’s doing it, get thee to Mat sez I (sincerely).

A Brief Word About The Title

Obviously the cut-off point in a project like this is a fairly arbitrary one, but I decided quite early on to toe the Biblical line and take my cue from the King James Bible, Psalm 90:10. In doing this I am well aware that I am blithely ignoring scientific advancements, life-style choices, etc. that have extended the human life-span into the high-90s and beyond. (I am also conveniently ignoring the Psalm’s caveat that “if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”)

This decision has nothing to do with any deeply-held religious beliefs. Rather, it is born entirely from a) expediency and b) aesthetics:

a) The progress from initial musings to physical book has taken almost a decade – to extend the concept to encompass a full century would take, at a generous estimate, at least another five years of research.

b) Seventy years presents, in my view, a far more symmetrical arc: one that can be summarised by Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man with approximately a neat ten years allocated to each stage between mewling infant and mere oblivion: childhood, adolescence, young adult, middle age, old age.

That all said, I do one day hope to extend the project to encompass all the years between seventy and one hundred.  This is very much a work in progress and, like all the best works in progress, exists solely between me, my book shelves and an Excel spreadsheet.  Watch this space (or subscribe and have it watched for you).