Tag Archives: Immortality

David Frum: What Does Secularism Offer in the Face of Mortality?

08 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by in Interview, Philosophy, Religion

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David Frum

Robert Wright: Given the fact that you’re not looking forward to an afterlife, well… maybe the best approach is to just not think about death. But if you do think about it, is there a way you console yourself in the face of it?

David Frum: When you’re younger, it seems a much more terrifying prospect than it does when you’re older. I think we do see it coming and we accept it.

My consolation in my final hours, I hope, will be that I won’t have left anything unsaid. I won’t have left any of the people that I love in any doubt that I love them. That, to the extent of my ability, I’ve made provision for them. That they’ll be secure after I’m gone…

There’s something kind of megalomaniacal about wanting more, wanting our actions to have eternal consequence. I mean, I suppose that’s literally true — if you have a baby, and the baby has a baby, and so on, then yes, your action has an eternal consequence. But we ourselves are going to be forgotten so soon, and those of us who aren’t forgotten are going to be so misunderstood that they might be happier being forgotten.

There are a lot of things that are remembered for ill or even for derision. Whoever invented the Phlogiston theory, he’s remembered — and his work is held up to mockery in science classes from now and for a long time to come.

We look at history and remember the people who left behind misery. Genghis Khan remains a celebrity to this day. But how many people know the name of the man who proved how cholera was caused? How many remember the dozens of obscure civil engineers who put in safe and reliable water piping so we wouldn’t have it anymore?

Most of that desire for remembrance, it usually ends up pretty badly.

__________

An exchange from Frum and Wright’s interview last month in Wright’s MeaningofLife.tv series. You can pick up Frum’s newest Why Romney Lost or Wright’s expansive book The Evolution of God.

So, I think the answer is a resounding not much. Though not exactly wrong, the approach is in many ways an exercise in managing expectations.

Though I disagree with a good bit of Frum’s outlook, I thoroughly enjoyed this interview, as I do almost all of Robert Wright’s conversations, especially those on his new series MeaningofLife.tv. It’s a program devoted to the big questions, with guests who, like Frum, are leaders in their fields though not professionally or at least chiefly concerned with issues of origin, meaning, morality, and destiny.

This combination makes for an informal, direct exchange, where intelligent people can make dinner table points instead of polishing well-worn soundbites. As you’ll see in the Frum interview, this is a man who’s thought a lot about these things, though I’m not sure he’s ever been asked a question like “Are you religious?” on camera.

His answer, by the way, is an interesting one. “I’m religious, but I’m not spiritual,” Frum replies, echoing a common though unacknowledged thread in modern reform Judaism. It’s the reversal of that well-worn yawn “I’m spiritual, but I’m…” Well, I can’t even bring myself to type it.

If you want to hear more of Frum, I recommend watching his appearance on Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher, which features a very worthwhile back and forth about why middle class America is falling to pieces.

You can also continue here:

Shostakovich and Music as a Protest against Death

12 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by in History

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Dmitri Shostakovich

“Shostakovich knew that death — unless it came in the form of heroic martyrdom — was not an appropriate subject for Soviet art, that it was ‘tantamount to wiping your nose on your sleeve in company.’ He could not have the Dies Irae blaze from his scores; he had to be musically covert. But increasingly, the cautious composer found the courage to draw his sleeve across his nostrils, especially in his chamber music. His last works often contain long, slow, meditative invocations of mortality. The violist of the Beethoven Quartet was once given the following advice about the first movement of the fifteenth quartet by its composer: ‘Play it so that the flies drop dead in mid-air.'”

“At the premiere, Shostakovich overcame his usual shyness to explain to the audience that, ‘Life is man’s dearest possession. It is given to him only once and he should live so as not to experience acute pain at the thought of the years wasted aimlessly or feel searing shame for his petty and inglorious past, but be able to say, at the moment of death, that he has given all his life and energies to the noblest cause in the world – to fight for the liberation of humanity. I want listeners to this symphony to realize that ‘life’ is truly beautiful. My symphony is an impassioned protest against death, a reminder to the living that they should live honestly, conscientiously, nobly, never committing a base act. This is very important for much time will pass before scientists have succeeded in ensuring immortality. Death is in store for all of us and I for one do not see any good in the end of our lives. Death is terrifying. There is nothing beyond it.’ … [Shostakovich] disagreed with all the composers who had portrayed death with music that was beautiful, radiant and ecstatic. For him, death really was the end and he took that as an inspiration to make sure that he lived his life to its full.”

__________

Paragraphs excerpted from Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of and the meticulous notes of composer Mark Wigglesworth. A fly-stunning version of Shostakovich’s fifteenth quartet is here.

Both writers cite a further, clarifying reflection from Shostakovich, which MW describes, “In the disputed memoirs… [Shostakovich] talks revealingly about death:

Fear of death may be the most intense emotion of all. I sometimes think that there is no deeper feeling. The irony lies in the fact that under the influence of that fear people create poetry, prose and music; that is they try to strengthen their ties with the living and increase their influence on them. How can you not fear death? […] We should think more about it and accustom ourselves to it. We can’t allow the fear of death to creep up on us unexpectedly. I think that if people began thinking about death sooner, they would make fewer mistakes.

Shostakovich makes the common though deeply misguided assumption that death serves no purpose — that there is not “any good in the end of our lives.” Of course there are individual tragedies which aren’t, in any sense, “good.” But death does the essential business of lending life a clarity and urgency it otherwise would not have. Saul Bellow’s brilliant metaphor, that death is “the dark backing a mirror needs before we can see ourselves,” sets the idea in place: without an ending, albeit an opague one, there is no way to focus on ourselves.

In case that metaphor hasn’t fully absorbed, Alan Lightman’s short story collection Einstein’s Dreams features a fictional world in which people live forever. He characterizes the tragedy of these immortal inhabitants:

[T]hey can do all they can imagine. They will have an infinite number of careers, they will marry an infinite number of times, they will change their politics infinitely. Each person will be a lawyer, a bricklayer, a writer, an accountant, a painter, a physician, a farmer…

With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great-aunts and great-uncles, great-great-aunts, and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their father. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own.

Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.

More:

  • Barnes looks at how his understanding of mortality changed as he entered adulthood
  • Sam Harris puts a fine point on the tragedy of wasted time
  • Neurologist David Eagleman explains how consciousness may transcend the physical brain

Dmitri Shostakovich

Imagine a World in which People Live Just One Day

18 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by in Literature, Philosophy

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Alan Lightman

Imagine a world in which people live just one day. Either the rate of heartbeats and breathing is speeded up so that an entire lifetime is compressed to the space of one turn of the earth on its axis—or the rotation of the earth is slowed to such a low gear that one complete revolution occupies a whole human lifetime. Either interpretation is valid. In either case, a man or woman sees one sunrise, one sunset.

In this world, no one lives to witness the change of the seasons. A person born in December in any European country never sees the hyacinth, the lily, the aster, the cyclamen, the edelweiss, never sees the leaves of the maple turn red and gold, never hears the crickets or the warblers. A person born in December lives his life cold. Likewise, a person born in July never feels a snowflake on her cheek, never sees the crystal on a frozen lake, never hears the squeak of boots on fresh snow. A person born in July lives her life warm. The variety of seasons is learned about in books.

In this world, a life is planned by light. A person born at sunset spends the first half of his life in nighttime, learns indoor trades like weaving and watchmaking, reads a great deal, becomes intellectual, eats too much, is frightened of the vast dark outdoors, cultivates shadows. A person born at sunrise learns outdoor occupations like farming and masonry, becomes physically fit, avoids books and mental projects, is sunny and confident, is afraid of nothing.

Both sunset and sunrise babies flounder when the light changes. When sunrise comes, those born at sunset are overwhelmed by the sudden sight of trees and oceans and mountains, are blinded by daylight. When sunset comes, those born at sunrise wail at the disappearance of birds in the sky, the layered shades of blue in the sea, the hypnotic movement of clouds. They wail and refuse to learn the dark crafts indoors, lie on the ground and look up and struggle to see what they once saw.

In this world in which a human life spans but a single day, people heed time like cats straining to hear sounds in the attic. For there is no time to lose. Birth, schooling, love affairs, marriage, profession, old age must all be fit within one transit of the sun, one modulation of light. When people pass on the street, they tip their hats and hurry on. When people meet at houses, they politely inquire of each other’s health and then attend to their own affairs. When people gather at cafes, they nervously study the shifting of shadows and do not sit long. Time is too precious. A life is a moment in season. A life is one snowfall. A life is one autumn day. A life is the delicate, rapid edge of a closing door’s shadow. A life is a brief movement of arms and of legs.

When old age comes, whether in light or in dark, a person discovers that he knows no one. There hasn’t been time. Parents have passed away at midday or midnight. Brothers and sisters have moved to distant cities, to seize passing opportunities. Friends have changed with the changing angle of the sun. Houses, towns, jobs, lovers have all been planned to accommodate a life framed in one day. A person in old age knows no one. He talks to people, but he does not know them. His life is scattered in fragments of conversation, forgotten by fragments of people. His life is divided into hasty episodes, witnessed by few. He sits at his bedside table, listens to the sound of his running bath, and wonders whether anything exists outside of his mind. Did that embrace from his mother really exist? Did that laughing rivalry with his school friend really exist? Did his lover exist? Where are they now, as he sits at his bedside table, listening to the sound of his running bath, vaguely perceiving the change of the light.

__________

A section from Alan Lightman’s ridiculously imaginative collection of short stories Einstein’s Dreams.

Immortality and Its Discontents

03 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by in Interview, Philosophy

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Kildare Beach“I don’t know if I used this image in the book, but there’s an image from ancient Chinese philosophy that tries to get you to understand how long immortality is. It says, imagine you have a beach with grains of sand—let’s imagine the size of the Sahara—and imagine a bird comes and takes one of the grains of sand and flies off. Ten thousand years later, that bird comes back and takes another grain of sand and flies off—and this happens every ten thousand years. Now, by the time the bird emptied the beach, emptied the entire Sahara, not a millisecond of eternity will have gone by. In other words, you have to realize that immortality lasts a really long time.

____

Let’s get into some of those specific changes that you think might take place under conditions of immortality. Could real love exist among immortals?

You seem to doubt it—you say that relationships would probably be “shallower.” And my intuition is to say that the intensity that brings lovers together, the passion and the urgency, has something to do with knowing we’re going to die, and that that sort of fervor might not be necessary under conditions of immortality. Is that where you’re going?

Yeah. And I think we can broaden it outside of death here as well, which is that part of loving is the urgency of recognizing that the person that you’re with may not always be there. It may go back to what you were saying earlier, that there’s a solidarity about death that perhaps we share—and share intimately—with someone we love.

If you’re immortal, you can imagine being sad or grieving if a lover leaves you. But if everyone were immortal, then that leaving isn’t necessarily forever. There’s always a chance that you get them back somewhere down the road—you know, in 5, 10, 20,000 years. So I think that the urgency of the moment gets sapped. One of the things that’s crucial to me about love is that it has to be in the moment. Love is not a promissory note. And once you remove some of that urgency, you diminish love.

You could potentially recover your love as an immortal, but you could also suffer at the hands of unrequited love for much, much longer. Imagine that you’re with someone and they leave you for your best friend. That’d be a tough reality to face for eternity.

I’m not sure that that would happen, but mostly because I’m not sure that it happens for most of us now. I mean, a lover leaves us and, sooner or later, most of us recover and go on. So, I don’t think we would project grief that far into the future.

As I talk about these things, one thing that I’m doing is trying to say, imagine ourselves on the basis of the kinds of beings we are now. If the change to immortality would fundamentally change these aspects of us, then of course all bets are off, including whether we can call ourselves the kinds of creatures we are now.

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Wheat

In my mind, one of the features that makes us who we are is our ethical impulse, our desire to know out how to live well. You say that under conditions of immortality, “Even justice would be imperiled.  The needs of others would not urge themselves on us in the same way, since their existence would not be threatened by our neglect.”

Obviously it’s true that if we can’t die, we needn’t worry about preventing other people’s deaths. But surely people could still suffer, and I’m wondering whether you think that under conditions of immortality, we would be any less concerned by that.

If I remember Borges’ story The Immortal correctly, there is a point where one of the immortals falls into a ravine or something like that and is left there—

For decades.

Yeah, for decades. And they said, “Look, we’ll get him, but surely there’s no rush.”

I’m of two minds about that moment. On the one hand, it seems callous in a way that I don’t think one’s immortality would necessarily bequeath. Because if you see somebody suffering, that’s surely going to be reason to stop, to do something to intervene.

On the other hand, I could imagine they’re thinking this: Well, we’ll get him out of the ravine, but it’s just going to bring him back into this shapeless life that he’s in now. So, the difference between the suffering in the ravine and the shapelessness of our lives is not so great as to foster an urgency. And I don’t know what I think about that. In the story, all of the monuments among which the immortals lived were left to erode, because they just didn’t have the meaning that they once had and the immortals said they could always rebuild them back at any time. So, I suspect that was the kind of thought that Borges had in mind when they left the person in the ravine.

____

Let’s talk about dealing with death. You write, “We know in some sense that we’re going to die. We know that our death will be the end of us, and that death is not an accomplishment or a goal, that it is once inevitable and uncertain, and yet we scurry about under this knowledge as though it had nothing to do with us.”

It’s pretty clear that you think that some sort of confrontation or reconciliation with the reality of death is a good thing, and an important thing, for human beings. I’m wondering what you think that confrontation should actually look like, or whether you think it should look like any particular thing.

I suspect that it has to be, in important ways, individualized, that what will be common to these experiences is the thought—not simply as a cognition but as something that rattles your being—that “I’m going to die.” And I think that can happen for different people in different ways, but it seems to me that that’s a thought that has to take hold of you, in one way or another, in order to confront death. And when it does, then one’s right there.

In the undergraduate seminar on death that I taught, there were moments where we were talking about death, and the students would just go quiet, because it was clear it was there in front of us—each of us individually was right there. But there wasn’t really anything to say at that moment, because each of us just had to look.

I would never teach the course again. I was very fortunate to have a great group of students. It’s hands-down the best course I’ll ever teach. But one of two things would happen: either I would get students who weren’t as good and it would just be a disappointment, or I would get students that were as good, and I’m just not sure I want to go through that again.

You mentioned staying up nights and thinking about it more than you wanted to…

Yeah.

____

You hear folks say things like, ‘On your deathbed, you won’t wish you’d spent more time in the office,’ and you take up that sentiment in the final chapter and elaborate on it nicely. You write, “Recognizing the fact of one’s death helps one sift through projects in order to separate out those that contribute in some way to making us who we want to be.” A kind of death filter.

And that, I think, is something that people experience themselves. When I was 17, I was operated on—I had a herniated disc—and the guy in the bed across from me was an older man. And at one point, we noticed that he had numbers tattooed on his forearm. He’d been in Auschwitz. He described his relation to life, and he said, “Look, each day—it’s amazing, because I wasn’t supposed to be here. Every day was a day I wasn’t slotted to see.” And what gave him that attitude was the imminence of his own death. It acted like a filter, to use your word, which I think is a good one. It acted like a filter in a very urgent way for him. And I think this is what you’re talking about.

Leaves

__________

From an interview with philosopher Todd May.

A supplementary point to make in regards to the Borges story: in an eternal existence, everyone would see every one of their friends fall into that ravine — everyone would eventually leave every one of their friends in that ravine, and everyone would eventually help them out. Everyone would spend an eternity in that ravine. Everyone would spend an eternity outside of it. Because in eternity, everything that can possibly happen, will happen, and will happen forever.

I believe this to be philosophically unarguable; yet practically it rings hollow. “How?” is the only question I can pose to this point, a question which is followed by silence. (Just as, in pondering “Why?” or “Why me?”, the universe doesn’t even tender to respond, “Why not?”).

And in this way, the prospect of temporality stretching into eternity is somehow beyond our cognitive abilities, and may be this way in principle. We can reach for it, but we cannot grasp.

When I was 15, I emailed some with Dinesh D’Souza about this point, and he justified his theological conception of time in this way–

“My idea of eternity is being outside of time, not stretching time back and forward infinitely. So I wouldn’t say that the body outlasts death in a temporal sense; rather, I would say that there is a different dimension of existence that outlasts temporal existence.”

So that’s one way of doing it, although it seems like a way of reverse-engineering one’s explanation to fit a foregone conclusion — a process which should, if one is honest, proceed in the opposite direction.

Two more points to add to this rumination on time and immortality:

1. Astronomers first deduced that the observable universe was not infinite in scope by observing that the night sky was dark. If the universe were infinite, they reasoned, the night sky would be completely bright — stars would take up every millimeter of sky — because in an infinitely large universe, there are an infinite number of stars. Just as in an infinitely long time scale, there are an infinite number of iterations of an infinite number of events.

2. That powerful observation from Saul Bellow: “Death is the dark backing a mirror needs before we can see ourselves.”

Some light Monday morning food for thought.

The pictures were taken in Charlottesville, Virginia, New Ulm, Texas, and Ireland.

One Thing You Can’t Imagine

13 Monday May 2013

Posted by in Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, Science

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Stephen Cave“What sets us apart is, of course, our massive, highly connected brains. These too have evolved to help us perpetuate ourselves indefinitely, and they are enormously useful in the struggle to survive. Our awareness of ourselves, of the future and of alternative possibilities enables us to adapt and make sophisticated plans. But it also gives us a perspective on ourselves that is at the same time terrifying and baffling. On the one hand, our powerful intellects come inexorably to the conclusion that we, like all other living things around us, must one day die. Yet on the other, the one thing that these minds cannot imagine is that very state of nonexistence; it is literally inconceivable. Death therefore presents itself as both inevitable and impossible. This I will call the Mortality Paradox, and its resolution is what gives shape to the immortality narratives, and therefore to civilization…

We are therefore blessed with powerful minds yet at the same time cursed, not only to die, but to know that we must. ‘Man has created death,’ wrote the poet W. B. Yeats. Other creatures blindly struggle on, knowing only life until their moment comes. ‘Except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death,’ wrote the Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges. But we bring death into life: we see it coming for us in every storm or forest fire, snake or spider, illness or ill omen.

This is a central theme of philosophy, poetry and myth; it is what defines us as mortals. It is represented in that most ancient and influential of stories, the book of Genesis: if they eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve are told, they will die— mortality is the price of knowledge. Since we attained self-awareness, as Michel de Montaigne wrote, ‘death has us by the scruff of the neck at every moment.’ No matter what we do, no matter how hard we strive, we know that the Reaper will one day take us. Life is a constant war we are doomed to lose.

But the second idea— and the other half of the Mortality Paradox— tells us quite the opposite: that our own obliteration is impossible. The fact is, whenever we try to imagine the reality of our own deaths we stumble. We simply cannot envision actually not existing. Try it: you might get as far as an image of your own funeral, or perhaps a dark and empty void, but you are still there— the observer, the envisioning eye. The very act of imagining summons you, like a genie, into virtual being.

We therefore cannot make death real to ourselves as thinking subjects. Our powerful imaginative faculties malfunction: it is not possible for the one doing the imagining to actively imagine the absence of the one doing the imagining. ‘It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators,’ wrote Sigmund Freud in 1915. He concluded from this that ‘at bottom no one believes in his own death . . . [for] in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.’ Or as the English Romantic poet Edward Young put it: ‘All men think all men mortal, but themselves.’

This applies no matter how far into the future we attempt to look: whether one or one thousand years from now, we cannot help but be present in what we see. There is no limit to just how far into the future we can project; it is not as if our imagination stops at a million years, or a billion. And so, to quote the Bible’s book of Ecclesiastes, God— or nature—‘has set eternity in the hearts of men.’ In our own minds, we are part of the very fabric of the universe, ineradicable, here forever. The great German writer Goethe is reported to have concluded that ‘in this sense everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within himself.’ We cannot conceive of our own nonexistence, he reasoned, and therefore our nonexistence is impossible.”

__________

From Stephen Cave’s book Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization.

I started reading this book late last night and got through about a third of it before falling asleep and into dreams about it. I’m convinced there is something very significant about this sort of software glitch in the human mind — this firewall that stands between us and the full picture of our own individual extinctions. (I’ve heard some people defiantly claim exception to Freud’s rule, but I’ve never found a convincing explanation as to what it looks like or how it’s conceptually possible.)

A fact that Cave doesn’t mention is that the second part of the Mortality Paradox applies even in our sleep. Strangely, even when our conscious minds are shut off and shut out from external sensory stimuli, we still cannot picture our own demise (you wake up at the moment you die in dreams). François de La Rochefoucauld coined a memorable epigram: “no man can look at the sun or his own death with a steady eye.” And it seems that’s true also when we’re asleep — when the sun is set.

Many poets have nodded to this strange feature of human cognition — that even when our conscious mind is shut off (like in REM sleep), we cannot die.

Ernest Dowson imagined our lives unfolding out of “a misty dream… within a dream” (isn’t that the plot of a Chris Nolan movie?)

Oscar Wilde complained, “reality is a dream that keeps me from sleeping”; a sentiment that sends a smirk to my face while on the bus most Monday mornings.

James Joyce — through his protagonist Stephen Dedalus — reflected soberly, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

The Cost of Immortality

30 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by in Literature

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Alan Lightman

“Suppose that people live forever.

Strangely, the population of each city splits in two: the Laters and the Nows.

The Laters reason that there is no hurry to begin their classes at the university, to learn a second language, to read Voltaire or Newton, to seek promotion in their jobs, to fall in love, to raise a family. In endless time, all things can be accomplished. Thus all things can wait. Indeed, hasty actions breed mistakes. And who can argue with their logic? The Laters can be recognized in any shop or promenade. They walk an easy gait and wear loose-fitting clothes. They take pleasure in reading whatever magazines are open or rearranging furniture in their homes, or slipping into conversation the way a leaf falls from a tree. The Laters sit in cafes sipping coffee and discussing the possibilities of life.

The Nows note that with infinite lives, they can do all they can imagine. They will have an infinite number of careers, they will marry an infinite number of times, they will change their politics infinitely. Each person will be a lawyer, a bricklayer, a writer, an accountant, a painter, a physician, a farmer. The Nows are constantly reading new books, studying new trades, new languages. In order to taste the infinities of life, they begin early and never go slowly. And who can question their logic? The Nows are easily spotted. They are the owners of the cafes, the college professors, the doctors and nurses, the politicians, the people who rock their legs constantly whenever they sit down. They move through a succession of lives, eager to miss nothing. When two Nows chance to meet at the hexagonal pilaster of the Zahringer Fountain, they compare the lives they have mastered, exchange information, and glance at their watches. When two Laters meet at the same location, they ponder the future and follow the parabola of the water with their eyes. The Nows and Laters have one thing in common. With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great-aunts and great-uncles, great-great-aunts, and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their father. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own.

When a man starts a business, he feels compelled to talk it over with his parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, ad infinitum, to learn from their errors. For no new enterprise is new. All things have been attempted by some antecedent in the family tree. Indeed, all things have been accomplished. But at a price. For in such a world, the multiplication of achievements is partly divided by the diminishment of ambition.

And when a daughter wants guidance from her mother, she cannot get it undiluted. Her mother must ask her mother, who must ask her mother, and so on forever. Just as sons and daughters cannot make decisions themselves, they cannot turn to parents for confident advice. Parents are not the source of certainty. There are one million sources.

Where every action must be verfified one million times, life is tentative. Bridges thrust halfway over rivers and then abruptly stop. Buildings rise nine stories high but have no roofs. The grocer’s stocks of ginger, salt, cod, and beef change with every change of mind, every consultation. Sentences go unfinished. Engagements end just days before weddings. And on the avenues and streets, people turn their heads and peer behind their backs, to see who might be watching.

Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past. These few souls, with their dear relatives looking on, dive into Lake Constance or hurl themselves from Monte Lema, ending their infinite lives. In this way, the finite has conquered the infinite, millions of autumns have yielded to no autumns, millions of snowfalls have yielded to no snowfalls, millions of admonitions have yielded to none.”

__________

From Alan Lightman’s novel Einstein’s Dreams.

At the moment, I have neither the time nor the energy to write a detailed exploration or explanation of this absolutely stunning piece of writing. But it is just too brilliant to pass up posting immediately. The overarching sentiment, which Lightman expresses with such imaginative clarity, strikes at the heart of what is perhaps humanity’s deepest existential conundrum. Namely, that we lament our mortal nature and desire above all else to live forever; yet immortality, when conceived of in earthly terms, soon becomes a far more horrid hypothetical state of existence. Lightman is not the first to point out this chilling contradiction. I copy here three additional quotes that play upon this same theme. (Bellow’s quote, especially, is one of the most stunning phrases I’ve ever heard — once you understand it, you’ll never forget it.)

“Would I be happy if I discovered that I would live forever? And the answer is no. Consider this argument. Think about what is forever. And think about the fact that the human mind, the entire human being, is built to last a certain period of time. Our programmed hormonal systems, the way we learn, the way we settle upon beliefs, and the way we love are all temporary. Because we go through a life’s cycle. Now, if we were to be plucked out at the age of 12 or 56 or whenever, and taken up and told, ‘Now you will continue your existence as you are. We’re not going to blot out your memories. We’re not going to diminish your desires.’ You will exist in a state of bliss – whatever that is – forever. […] Now think, a trillion times a trillion years. Enough time for universes like this one to be born, explode, form countless star systems and planets, then fade away to entropy. You will sit there watching this happen millions and millions of times and that will be just the beginning of the eternity that you’ve been consigned to in this existence.”
Famed biologist E.O.Wilson, when asked if he would like to live forever

“Death is the dark backing a mirror needs before we can see ourselves.”
Saul Bellow

I reason, Earth is short —
And Anguish — absolute —
And many hurt,
But, what of that?

I reason, we could die —
The best Vitality
Cannot excel Decay,
But, what of that?

I reason, that in Heaven —
Somehow, it will be even —
Some new Equation, given —
But, what of that?
Emily Dickinson