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It's standard commentary to remark on the amazing duration of Keith Richards. BTW, I recommend his "Life" memoir. Today a guy in the Journal wrote about the coming birthday.

It is the band’s rhythm guitarist who personifies immortality. As the bumper sticker has it, “Think of the world we’ll be leaving Keith Richards.” How this riff-drunk ragamuffin, who turns 82 on Dec. 18, not only survived but stayed relevant is a mystery, a puzzle wrapped inside a guitar string. Solving it may be the best hope the rest of us have of aging gracefully....

It’s Keith—squeezing his life like a press, turning a brush with death into maybe the most beautiful ballad in rock ’n’ roll—that gives us hope.

Keith says he doesn’t know where the songs come from. “Great songs write themselves,” he explains in “Life.” “You’re just being led by the nose, or the ears. The skill is not to interfere with it too much.” But I think I do know. It’s the confrontation between a sensibility and the abyss, not just touching the edge but coming away with a song, that makes a person seem everlasting.

To me, the lesson is simple: If you keep going long enough, if you keep playing, if you stay in the game, if you get up just one more time than you’ve been knocked down, people will ascribe to you a quality that is indistinguishable from wisdom.