by Andrew Stark
Wednesday then rolls around. I continue to support Ted Cruz, write children’s stories, and maintain a deadly earnestness as I began to do for the first time on Tuesday. But I now also permanently cease doing everything I carried over to Tuesday from Monday. I quit having loving thoughts about my wife, replacing them with a desire to become a Benedictine monk. I resolve never again to walk the dog and, in lieu, take up daily naps. And I forever lose my free-floating anxiety and become instead reliably cheerful.
Over the period from Monday to Wednesday, half of my memories, desires, feelings, perceptions, and thoughts continued on from one day to the next in staggered fashion. But most of us would reject the claim that I am any more the same self, or am leading the same life, on Wednesday as I was on Monday. If everything permanently changes in the space essentially of one day, Tuesday, doesn’t that amount to a total rupture of the sort we associate with blanket amnesia or other kinds of dramatic personality breakdown?
All of which suggests that there’s something fundamentally misconceived about the entire enterprise of analogizing a person’s memories, desires, thoughts, hopes, commitments, aspirations, attachments, and perceptions to a rope’s fibers or a ship’s planks. We might think that as long as those memories, thoughts, hopes, and perceptions change in staggered fashion—half, say, remaining the same while half change during any given period of time—then even if all of them eventually completely turned over to forestall boredom we’d remain the same self.
But in practical terms there’s no unit of time—seconds, days, years—over which this would work. Either there aren’t enough memories, desires, intentions, perceptions, and so forth to speak of “half” of them in the first place, as when the unit is small, like seconds. Or there are enough but far less than half of them would survive from one unit to the next, as when that unit is large, like years. Or else, as with days, there are enough memories, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings and half of them might reasonably be expected to survive from one to the next—but then total turnover could occur within a space of time, a single day, far too brief to be called “staggered.”
So let’s set aside, for the moment, the question of whether any particular adjacent periods in our life—be they seconds, days, or years—share at least half of their memories, desires, beliefs, feelings, experiences, and plans. Let’s consider, instead, a different question: whether any particular memories, desires, beliefs, feelings, experiences, and plans repeatedly occur in at least half of the periods—be they days, months, or years—over most of our life. What keeps me the same person over time might simply be that, in half or more of my days or months or years, from childhood to old age, the same small number of memories, thoughts, feelings, attachments, and desires recurrently cross my consciousness: regardless of whether most of the rest fail to make it even from one day, let alone month or year, to the next.
Think of Molly’s early morning reflections as she lies in bed next to Bloom in Ulysses. Far more than half of the thoughts, feelings, memories, plans, and sensations that wash across her mind probably won’t survive even till the following dawn: a semiconscious thought of people getting up in China as her alarm rings; her plans to buy flowers at Lambes. But a select few number among those she undoubtedly does have on most of the days of her life—and certainly countless times every single year: memories of the men who were interested in her in the past, or her frustrated desires for a career as a singer. Google the phrase “there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think of [X],” and see what you get. It is these that make her—and us—a continuing self.
Or what about Claude Sylvanshine, the hapless IRS official from David Foster Wallace’s Pale King? Sitting on a Chicago–Peoria flight, Sylvanshine contemplates the seat number on his armrest, a mental event he never had before nor ever will again, even within that day. Most of the thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and intentions that cross his mind during the trip fall into that category. But a certain few are ones he has every year, many, many times, and probably most days, so that they become the stitches that knit his psychological life together. Like the feeling of impending terror that Claude has come to imagine in the form of a predatory bird. These kinds of relatively few but persistent memories, thoughts, hopes, and feelings are what make us the same self over the course of our life. Our self gradually emerges as they do in our early years. And it then gradually disappears with them during the mental ravages of old age.
The idea that Parfit floats is a short-term quantitative one. We examine all the separate memories, desires, thoughts, plans, perceptions, and feelings that cross our mind today, and all the ones that did yesterday, and if half are similar then we remain the same self on this day as we were on the previous one. And we will continue to remain the same self for as long as this criterion is met.
But what if, in reality, far more than half—Molly’s drowsy image of people getting up in China, Sylvanshine’s momentary glimpse of the number on his armrest—don’t even last beyond the day? More important, what about the far less than half—Molly’s desire to sing, or Sylvanshine’s thoughts of the terrifying bird of prey—that cross our mind during far more than half of our days for decades? And what about those few that cross our mind if not on most days then at least once a month, like Bernstein’s memory, in Citizen Kane, of the girl he had seen on the ferry years before (“I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl”). Shouldn’t the long-term, qualitative importance of those fewer but far more persistent memories, thoughts, feelings, sensations, and intentions not ultimately be determinant as to whether our self persists over time—and when it ends?
But if they are, then we run smack into Bernard Williams’s dilemma.
For it’s precisely such memories, plans, feelings, thoughts, perceptions, and desires—the comparatively small number that enter our mind consistently, and perhaps more days than not, year in and year out—that would eventually have to be abandoned if we are to avoid immortal boredom. After all, if anything becomes boring over endless time, it will be those memories, aspirations, attachments, experiences, and emotions that become most familiar and repetitious. If anything, it will be his thinking about the bird of prey every single day for endless thousands of years that will sooner or later render Sylvanshine exquisitely tired of himself, just as dwelling ad nauseum on her frustrated desire to be a singer will for Molly. But then, if that same recurrent drumbeat of a particular few memories, beliefs, thoughts, plans, and desires are the ones that define the self—and if they are also what must be shaken off in order to avoid immortal boredom—the self they defined will go with them. Would Sylvanshine be Sylvanshine without the bird of prey? Or Molly be Molly without her desire to sing? Parts of their selves would have disappeared.
So it looks as if it might be Williams’s immortal choice—boredom or eventual death in life—after all.
Fibers overlapping in a rope. Or planks getting replaced in a staggered fashion on a ship. Let’s look more closely at these fiber and plank metaphors—metaphors for the memories, desires, perceptions, sensations, and other mental contents that make up our life.
A rope, as it extends in space, can indeed be made up of separate fibers that begin and end in staggered fashion. Over space, it can remain the same rope at the beginning as at the end, even if no fibers remain the same throughout. But what about over time? Do new fibers get added to a rope in staggered fashion as old ones fray and crumble? No. Maybe a few tufts get lost here or there. But the rope’s main fibers last as long as the rope does—in time, if not in space. And once those fibers are gone, so is the rope. It’s the same rope at the beginning as at the end of its existence only if some fibers—in fact most—remain the same throughout.
Likewise with the planks in a ship. Certainly, they might be staggered in space. Think of the boards on a ship’s deck. They don’t all begin and end at the same line any more than the boards do in your living-room floor. Over its length, it remains the same ship even if none
of the planks at the stern are the same as the ones at the bow. But can a ship change all its planks in staggered fashion over time, as the ship of Theseus metaphor requires, while remaining the same vessel? No. Sure, some—maybe most—pieces of wood in the decks or cabins or masts might get replaced, possibly on several occasions, over time. But a ship’s broad structural beams? Its oaken hull strut? Those remain the same for the life of the ship. The one part of a ship that never gets replaced is its structural keel; if it breaks, the ship dies. A new keel means a new ship. It lasts for as long as the ship does, and in fact defines how long the ship lasts.5
Ropes and ships, it turns out, furnish inapt metaphors if what they’re meant to show is that a self can change all of its memories, desires, beliefs, anxieties, plans, and feelings over time and still remain the same as long as those changes are staggered. For in fact at least some components of a rope or a ship—most of its fibers and certain of its planks—must persist in time, even if not in space, for as long as the rope or ship itself does. And once they are gone, so is the rope or ship. If anything, these metaphors reinforce the idea that it is our most persistent, recurrent memories, feelings, thoughts, experiences, and desires that define the self. And once we completely replace them even if in a staggered fashion—as immortals would ultimately have to do to avoid interminable boredom—then the self they constituted would have died.
So let’s consider a truly temporal metaphor that purports to capture the idea that a human being can shed all her memories, desires, beliefs, plans, and attachments, replacing them with new ones—and yet remain the same self—as long as the shedding and replacing has been staggered over time.
Think about the husbands and wives in the Van Tricasse family, from Jules Verne’s novella Dr. Ox’s Experiment. Beginning in the year 1340, each time one spouse dies the surviving partner immediately marries someone much younger. On any given day over the subsequent centuries, at least one of the two spouses is the same as on the day before, even though neither of the partners in 1440, let alone 1840, is the same as he or she was in 1340. There is always continuity, never any total break. The Van Tricasses believed that this arrangement constituted the same marriage extending over hundreds of years, not simply recurrent generations of new people replacing old ones.
This is the acid test. If you agree with the Van Tricasses, then you’d agree that a person can remain the same self over time, even if all her memories, desires, feelings, perceptions, and intentions are totally different, as long as the changes have been staggered. But most of us, I think, would not regard this as the same marriage over time. It’s a series of new ones. Wholly new people, even if they’re “staggered,” make it a new one. Likewise, wholly new memories, desires, intentions, plans, and beliefs, even if they’re staggered, make a new person. To truly avoid immortal boredom, it would seem, we must die—one way or another.
If the self is like a rope, then it’s like a rope in time, not in space. Some memories, hopes, plans, imaginings, feelings, and desires must remain the same over the self’s entire temporal life if it’s to persist as the same self—just as some fibers in a rope must remain the same over its entire temporal life, even if not over its entire spatial length, if it’s to persist as the same rope. But that suggests that an immortal life, if it is to elude the sameness of memory, plans, hopes, ambitions, feelings, experiences, and desires that over millennia would lead to excruciating boredom, would eventually have to involve its own form of death: an utter alienation from and desertion of previous selves, and the memories, plans, desires, and attachments—all the mental contents—that defined them. Ultimately immortality would be no better than mortality. Bernard Williams’s consolation has validity.6
eleven
A WISTFUL BACKWARD GLANCE
Nostalgia, as Simone Signoret remarked in her 1976 autobiography, isn’t what it used to be. Each new generation yearns for the high water mark of the previous one. Woody Allen played with this theme in Midnight in Paris. A contemporary American writer longs for the Jazz Age literary scene, to which he then finds himself magically transported, only to fall in love with a flapper nostalgic for the 1890s Belle Epoque, to which they then miraculously travel, only to then encounter Degas, Gauguin, and Toulouse-Lautrec, all nostalgic for a still earlier age, and so on. Nostalgia, in this sense, never is—or ever could be—what it used to be.
But there’s another sense in which nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. As we in the early twenty-first century think of it, nostalgia is a temporal notion. It means, colloquially, a longing for a lost time, a time we have left behind. But it used to be—in fact it originated as—a spatial notion, a longing for a lost place, a home we have left behind. When the word “nostalgia” was minted in the eighteenth century, the historian Thomas Dodman reports, it “differed from subsequent forms of ‘nostalgia’ by its spatial as opposed to temporal construction.”1 As late as 1949, the New York Times was flatly asserting that “nostalgia means ‘homesickness’—nothing more, nothing less. The word [comes] from the Greek nostos, ‘a return home,’ plus algia, ‘pain.’”2
This point needs a bit of adjustment. Even when it carried spatial connotations—an aching for a lost home—nostalgia necessarily conveyed as well a temporal meaning. After all, to move away from home logically entails transit not just in space but in time. Emigrés pining for the warm embrace of the youth they spent in the old country are missing something that is now distant not just in miles but in years. The author of a 1935 Washington Post article, Theodore Hall, captured this mixed spatial-temporal yearning when he spoke of his “homesickness for the old days in America.”3 Hall was referring to his generation of farm boys who had flooded America’s teeming cities in the early years of the twentieth century, only to find themselves tearily nostalgic decades later for what they had left behind—left behind both in space and in time. So spatial nostalgia almost always has a temporal dimension.
According to the philosopher Hans Jonas, an immortal life would instill in those living it a lengthening, deepening, and finally intolerable—and of course interminable—nostalgia: but it would be a nostalgia of a purely temporal sort, a longing for an eternally receding past. It’s a scenario for immortality that splits the difference between those discussed in the previous two chapters: boredom, on the one hand, and recurrent self-alienation on the other.
The boredom scenario would arise if, in an immortal existence, both our self and our lives ceased to change. Suppose that the memories, commitments, values, desires, thoughts, feelings, and anxieties that make up our original self all stayed with us as we moved forward endlessly in time. And imagine that the events of our lives, continually flowing through our fingers backward in time, all began to repeat themselves as the millennia passed. At one point we would have seen it all, done all we cared to do, and nothing new would ever seem to happen.
The self-alienation scenario, equally unpalatable, would emerge from the opposite situation. Suppose that our immortal selves did keep shedding our old memories, desires, commitments, beliefs, habits, and aspirations, replacing them with new ones. And suppose, too, that our endless lives did continue to throw novel and unprecedented events at us. True, we wouldn’t be bored. We’d continue to experience and do new things. But then we’d also undergo a recurrent alienation from our past selves and lives. Our old selves and lives would in effect keep ending to make way for new ones. And that, of course, is what defines mortality, not immortality.
The third immortality scenario, the one that transfixes Hans Jonas, combines aspects of these other two. It would descend on immortals whose memories, values, commitments, passions, desires, and habits did remain the same over the ages (so no self-alienation), but whose lives nevertheless still regularly presented them with new events and unprecedented challenges (so no boredom). Unfortunately, such an existence would induce a crushing nostalgia as time passed.
Why? Even for us mortals, Jonas says, the past “grows in us all the time, with its load of knowledge a
nd opinion and emotions and choices and acquired aptitudes and habits and, of course, things upon things remembered.” Given the growing weight of the past within us—our memories, feelings, aptitudes and habits—suppose, then, that we were immortal, but faced a future of unending upheaval and change. And why wouldn’t we, Jonas asks, since generations of “new comers [would] keep arriving” over the ages with their never-before-seen ideas, talents, desires, and tastes. Sooner or later wouldn’t we find ourselves “stranded,” as Jonas says, “in a world we no longer [understood] even as spectators, walking anachronisms who have outlived themselves?”4 Wouldn’t we pine for the ever-more-distant past, which long ago captured our memories, formed our desires, shaped our habits, and forged our emotional attachments, fruitlessly yearning for it to return?
Jonas seals his case by calling himself as a witness. While he “can still be moved” when he remembers the culture of his youth in Weimar Rhineland, a culture that awakened his passions and tastes, Jonas—now in his eighties—declares that
the art of our own time is alien to me, I don’t understand its language, and in that respect I feel already a stranger in the world. The prospect of unendingly becoming one ever more and in every respect would be frightening, and the certainty that prevents it is reassuring.5
Such would be the fate of any immortal, if her memory, feelings, habits, passions and beliefs retained ever-more white-knuckled attachments to an ever-receding past, while she confronted an unendingly churning and novel future.
Or would it? After all, profound nostalgia—of the mixed spatial-temporal sort—has marked innumerable worthwhile and intensely rich mortal lives. Think of the exiled Nabokov’s lifelong yearnings for Vyra, his family’s estate outside Saint Petersburg. Or Samad Iqbal’s mournful backward glances at Bangladesh in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Or the memoirist Suketu Mehta, finding himself “in one city” while “dreaming of the other . . . an exile; [a] citizen of the country of longing.”6