M.H. Abrams

Just a month ago I pointed out oh-my-fucking-god that M.H. Abrams, the original editor of the Norton anthology which we all assumed was 100 years old already back when we read it in college decades ago, is  1) a real person  2) STILL ALIVE!! And today in the Times (sorry fellow Richmonders but yes, I mean the New York Times) there's an interview with Abrams and the current editor Stephen Greenblatt (presumably of the Brighton Beach Memoir Greenblatt's, obvi):

For a prospective undergraduate reading this Q. and A., how would you answer the question, Why study literature?

Abrams: Ha — Why live? Life without literature is a life reduced to penury. It expands you in every way. It illuminates what you’re doing. It shows you possibilities you haven’t thought of. It enables you to live the lives of other people than yourself. It broadens you, it makes you more human. It makes life enjoyable. There’s no end to the response you can make to that question, but Stephen has a few things to add.

Greenblatt: Literature is the most astonishing technological means that humans have created, and now practiced for thousands of years, to capture experience. For me the thrill of literature involves entering into the life worlds of others. I’m from a particular, constricted place in time, and I suddenly am part of a huge world — other times, other places, other inner lives that I otherwise would have no access to.

Abrams: Yes. Literature makes life much more worth living.

Greenblatt: You speak with the full wisdom of your hundred years of life.

Abrams: That’s portentous enough.

Anyone else creeped out that suddenly he's popped up twice in one month, after being a dust-covered name on bookshelves for half a century? As in, he's gonna die soon? Sorry, but bugging me