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Updated: May 25, 2025
They would have died, like good children, in most average country places; but eight months of shelter in a regulated temperature, in a well-sunned house, in a duly moistened air, with good sidewalks to go about on in all weather, and four months of the cream of summer and the fresh milk of Jersey cows, make the little sham organizations the worm-eaten wind-falls, for that 's what they look like hang on to the boughs of life like "froze-n-thaws"; regular struldbrugs they come to be, a good many of 'em.
The explorer further discovered that, after the age of eighty, the marriages of the Struldbrugs were dissolved, because the law thought it a reasonable indulgence that those who were condemned, without any fault of their own, to a perpetual continuance in the world, should not have their misery doubled by the load of a wife; also that they could never amuse themselves with reading, because their memory would not serve to carry them from the beginning of a sentence to the end; and after about two hundred years, they could not hold conversation with their neighbours, the mortals, because the language of the country was always upon the flux.
There is indeed a perpetual commerce between this kingdom and the great empire of Japan; and it is very probable, that the Japanese authors may have given some account of the struldbrugs; but my stay in Japan was so short, and I was so entirely a stranger to the language, that I was not qualified to make any inquiries.
Swift's account of the Struldbrugs is not very amusing reading for old people, but some may find it a consolation to reflect on the probable miseries they escape in not being doomed to an undying earthly existence. There are strange diversities in the way in which different old persons look upon their prospects.
Are they in reality anything else than literary Struldbrugs? "I conclude upon the whole that Aristophanes did not like any of the tragedians; yet no one will deny that this keen, witty, outspoken writer was as good a judge of literary value, and as able to see any beauties that the tragic dramas contained as nine-tenths, at any rate, of ourselves.
And he appealed to me, whether in those countries I had travelled, as well as my own, I had not observed the same general disposition.” After this preface, he gave me a particular account of the struldbrugs among them. He said, “they commonly acted like mortals till about thirty years old; after which, by degrees, they grew melancholy and dejected, increasing in both till they came to fourscore.
I could not but agree, that the laws of this kingdom relative to the struldbrugs were founded upon the strongest reasons, and such as any other country would be under the necessity of enacting, in the like circumstances.
To me he is, like the greater number of classics in all ages and countries, a literary Struldbrug, rather than a true ambrosia-fed immortal. There are true immortals, but they are few and far between; most classics are as great impostors dead as they were when living, and while posing as gods are, five-sevenths of them, only Struldbrugs.
His passionate love of beauty made him see in old age only ugliness; he could not foresee the joys of the mellow years. All he saw consisted of grey hairs, wrinkles, double chins, paunches. To him all old people were Struldbrugs. We smile at the insolence of youth, because we know it will pass with the beauty and strength that support it.
That the oldest had still hopes of living one day longer, and looked on death as the greatest evil, from which nature always prompted him to retreat. Only in this island of Luggnagg the appetite for living was not so eager, from the continual example of the struldbrugs before their eyes.
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