A dangerous age

I just turned 37. Some people think it’s a dangerous age. And they’re the kind of people it seems you just have to believe, because their voices tell you they have seen it all and lived to tell the tale.

At the age of 37 (Marianne Faithfull informs me), Lucy Jordan realized she’d never ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair.

Vladimir Vysotsky was particularly apprehensive about the number 37, although, as he conceded in his meditation “On Fatal Dates and Numbers,” it is true that Lermontov, Yesenin, and Christ departed even earlier. But 37 was the age reached by Pushkin and Mayakovsky, by Byron and Rimbaud:

С меня при цифре 37 в момент слетает хмель,
Вот и сейчас - как холодом подуло:
Под эту цифру Пушкин подгадал себе дуэль
И Маяковский лег виском на дуло.

Задержимся на цифре 37! Коварен бог
Ребром вопрос поставил: или - или!
На этом рубеже легли и Байрон, и Рембо,
А нынешние - как-то проскочили.

– V. Vysotsky, О фатальных датах и цифрах

In the event, though, Vysotsky outlived them by five years. There is that. And anyway, I’m a lousy poet and I have no duels scheduled, so I’m not unduly worried. As for driving in Paris, I really have no regrets, so I’m not going to start climbing any roofs about it.