Well, it's really a pleasure to be here with you. There's a handout right up there in the corner.

If you don't have a handout, maybe someone can pass one or two around.

And what a great pleasure to see such a great crowd on a cold and lustry night.

But to discuss something very high and beautiful, which I hope that you'll find it as satisfying,

as warming to the heart and to the soul as I do.

We see around us in the world around us,

sort of obvious truth that we grow old and eventually die.

And when I was a student here at Yale back in the 90s,

I felt much younger than I do now.

You know, time passes.

And there's not really anything you can do to stop that.

Many people would like to try to stop it. And oddly, we live in a culture that's,

you might say, more concerned than ever before with trying to remain young and appear young.

But, of course, that preoccupation or that desire has been with the human race from the beginning. there has been a lot of attempts, there have been a lot of attempts to find the fountain of youth, or some kind of now technological means, or some pharmaceutical means to extend our lives, or even if we could find it, the medicine that would keep us from dying, definitively keep us from dying.

We don't want to die, of course. And there's something deeply right about that, actually.

Because as we begin to appreciate what the human creature is,

we see that there's some kind of terrible loss at the end of the life of a human being.

Is there a remedy for this?

If there were, if you could go to the drugstore and buy it,

how much do you think it would cost?

Imagine what a pharmaceutical company would charge

that discovered that formula, right? It would be enormously expensive,

...