How to Reach 500 by the Time You're 30

I’m sure you’ve all heard the phrase, “wise old owl.” For some reason, we symbolize wisdom with owls, but why must they be old owls? Why can’t they be young or even baby owls? Well, the “old” adjective points to another cultural assumption: the older you get, the wiser you become. Quintilian even says as much when he notes that “greater authority is attributed to old men, as they are thought to have known and seen more than others” (424). Amazingly, age is a factor that may contribute to a speaker’s (or rhetorician’s) ethos.

With the above context in mind, I had a mini mind-blown moment after reading this: “[S]tudy affords us such advantage, that, as far as knowledge of events is concerned, we seem even to have lived in past ages” (424). When you were little, did you ever think it’d be sweet to live several hundred years instead of seventy years? (I used to have a very romantic idea of the Victorian age). What experiences, what knowledge, could you have after living several lifetimes? Well, Quintilian basically says that the way to live lifetimes in a life is through study, through reading the words of people across the ages: “We now compute, not how many years we have studied, but how many we have lived” (427).

Others before us have done the hard work of discovery and debate, and so now we have the easier task to just learn from them (427). We have access to a “shortcut” which allows us, in a short period of time, to glean lessons from people who devoted their entire lives to a particular subject. Sometimes novelists write sentences like, “She seemed older than her years accounted for.” Rather than a poor girl who had to “grow up” quickly because of tragedy, what if the “she” in the sentence is referring to a writer or rhetorician? I’ve never considered that idea that extensive study could “add years” to your life—and that this uncanny, unphysical “old age” could substantially increase your ethos appeal.