Word: methuselah
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...DEATH OF METHUSELAH AND OTHER STORIES by Isaac Bashevis Singer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $17.95). At 83, the Yiddish yarn spinner shows undiminished power to capture the peculiar din of human commerce...
...wasted less time to be concerned that birds would stop singing or the world suddenly grow sensible and dull. Forces of nature do not stop voluntarily. Sure enough, a book of 22 new Singer stories appeared in 1985, and now here come 20 more in The Death of Methuselah and Other Stories. In the space of six years, while moving into his ninth decade, the author has managed to render his earlier collection decidedly incomplete...
...cranky contrariness enlivens these and all Singer stories. Even the Methuselah of the title story, aged 969 years and impatient for death, can be stirred back to sexual life. In A Peephole in the Gate, a man laments that his advanced years have not brought the serenity he expected: "I reckoned that after 70 a person stops musing about all petty things. But the head does not know how old it is. It remains young and full of the same foolishness as at 20." The prospect of such protracted turmoil may not please everyone, but the news is conveyed...
Compared with the average bug, which goes from birth to death in less than a year, the 17-year cicada is Methuselah: it has the longest life cycle of any known insect. In all, there are twelve distinct broods of 17-year cicadas, each of which emerges in a different year. This year's group is referred to by scientists as Brood 10. The other large group, Brood 14, is due to make its next appearance...
...topic does not explain why writers insist on making dramatic molehills out of this political mountain (were George Bernard Shaw alive today, he might have been able to inject some new dramatic tension into the form, but in all likelihood we would have gotten another Back to Methuselah instead of a Major Barbara). What prompts people like Kopit to encroach upon the territory of nuclear arms gurus like Jonathan Schell or Joe Nye, when Kubrick beat them to the atomic punch 24 years...