by Andrew Stark
6. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, 955: “A certain similarity exists . . . between all the women we successively love, a similarity that is due to the fixity of our own temperament . . .”
7. James McKinley, Jr., “Hard Times, with Regret but Without Apology,” New York Times, September 28, 2012.
8. CNN, “Erin Burnett Outfront,” August 23, 2012, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1208/23/ebo.01.html.
9. Vaillant, Aging Well, 170; George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 212.
10. Lewis uses the word “real” in a way that differs from my usage, but that doesn’t matter for purposes here. By the “real world,” I simply mean the actual world, the one we live in.
11. See, e.g., Stephen Barker, “Can Counterfactuals Really Be About Possible Worlds?,” Nous 45:3 (2011): 559–61.
12. David K. Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Malden: Blackwell, 2001), 234.
13. Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 44, 52–53; Saul A. Kripke, Philosophical Troubles: Collected Papers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1:315.
14. Kripke, Philosophical Troubles, 1:316: “I wish to emphasize the legitimacy of setting up possible worlds by any description we understand.”
15. Michel de Montaigne, “Of Repentance,” in The Complete Essays, ed. and trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1993).
16. Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 541; see also Bernard N. Schumacher, Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 108.
17. Joel Rubinoff, “Rhoda Morgenstern’s Cathartic Long Goodbye,” Guelph Mercury, March 23, 2013.
18. Nina Martyris, “Mourning Tongues: How Auden Was Modified in the Guts of the Living,” Los Angeles Review of Books, January 28, 2014.
19. Harold Brodkey, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 68.
20. Larry King, Remember Me When I’m Gone: The Rich and the Famous Write Their Own Epitaphs and Obituaries (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 195.
21. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 543.
22. Milan Kundera, Immortality (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999), 68.
23. Ibid., 91–92.
24. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 537–39.
Chapter 7. You Never Know
1. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (New York: Knopf, 1995), 1:500.
2. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, 1011.
3. Richard Verrier, “Bronfman’s Lyricist Career Gets Help from Friends,” Los Angeles Times, November 28, 2003.
4. Abou Ali Farman Farmaian, “Secular Immortal” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2012), 478.
5. Mark Johnston, Surviving Death (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 306.
6. Ibid., 372.
7. Ibid., 137, 141.
8. Ibid., 350.
Chapter 8. Making Your Mark
1. See the mention in David Kaplan, “Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice,” in Approaches to Natural Language, ed. Jaakko Hintikka (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1973), 516.
2. Kathleen Teltsch, “Wanted: Contributors in Search of Immortality,” New York Times, June 11, 1993.
3. Tyler Cowen, What Price Fame? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 176.
4. The Tragic Sense of Life (Mineola: Dover, 1954), 52.
5. Kripke, Naming and Necessity, 87; Kripke uses the term “marks” on 106.
6. For some exceptions, see Christopher Hughes, Kripke: Names, Necessity and Identity (Oxford: Clarendon), 44.
7. Heidegger, What Is a Thing?, 24.
8. Saul A. Kripke, Reference and Existence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 13.
9. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, 581.
10. Oliver Sacks, “Speak, Memory,” New York Review of Books, February 21, 2013, 19–21.
11. The Groucho Letters: Letters to and from Groucho Marx (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 159–60.
12. F. R. Westie, “Academic Expectations of Professional Immortality,” American Sociologist 8 (1973): 19–32.
13. Shelley’s fictional Ozymandias was most probably based on the real pharaoh Ramses II. But I will ignore that equation here and assume that all we know of Ozymandias comes from the poem.
14. I have occasionally pondered the practice of referring to people with definite or indefinite articles, as in “A John Jackson knocked on my door” or “He then married one Alice Smith.” I assume that the use of “a” and “one” in these contexts signals an awareness by the speaker that the name alone isn’t enough to call a particular person to a listener’s mind; otherwise “John Jackson knocked on my door” or “He then married Alice Smith” would suffice. In this context, “a” and “one” are placeholders for the specific person, who otherwise could have been anyone.
15. Kripke, Naming and Necessity, 75.
Chapter 9. Is This All There Is?
1. Saul Bellow, Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 18.
2. Stendhal, Love (London: Penguin, 1975), 208.
3. Sean Healy, Boredom, Self, and Culture (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984), 49.
4. For a good discussion of immortal boredom, see John Martin Fischer and Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin, “Immortality and Boredom,” Journal of Ethics 18 (2014): esp. 363.
5. Anthony Hecht, in Jonathan F. S. Post, ed., The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 124; David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), 16.
6. Lucretius, De rerum Natura/Of the Nature of Things (London: J. M. Dent, 1921), Book III, ll. 1069–94.
7. See, e.g., Carlos Eire, A Very Brief History of Eternity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
8. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, “Eternity,” Journal of Philosophy 78 (1981): 446–47.
9. Wendy Doniger, Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 202–3.
10. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 261.
11. Søren Kierkegaard, “Either/Or,” in The Essential Kierkegaard (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 56.
12. Camus, The Outsider (London: Penguin, 2000), 77.
13. Arthur Koestler, Dialogue with Death (New York: Macmillan, 1942), 117.
14. Karel Čapek, The Makropoulos Secret (Boston: Luce, 1925), 92.
15. See, e.g., Katherine Hawley, How Things Persist (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), 96.
16. Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom (London: Reaktion, 2005), 45.
17. J. G. Ballard, Miracles of Life: An Autobiography (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), 73. No wonder that Alberto Moravia called true boredom a “withering of objects.” See his Boredom (New York: New York Review of Books Classic, 1999), 7.
Chapter 10. Still Life
1. Timothy Chappell, “Infinity Goes Up on Trial: Must Immortality Be Meaningless?,” European Journal of Philosophy 17 (2009): 4.
2. Ibid., 8.
3. François-René de Chateaubriand, The Memoirs of Chateaubriand, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Hamish Hamilton, 1961), 73; see also John Martin Fischer, “Why Immortality Is Not So Bad,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 2 (1994): 257–70.
4. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 206–7.
5. See, e.g., James Gilliam, “History of Sailing Yacht Masts, Rigging and Sails: 1900–Present Day,” BoatDesign, http://boatdesign.net/articles/mast-materials/ (accessed January 1, 2016).
6. In Chapter 3, I argued that our sense of future continuity is based on the idea of our bare subject moving ever onward, minute by minute in time, even if—as in the Operation case—all our memories, plans, attachments, hopes, and
beliefs get eradicated and replaced. And so: isn’t there at least some basic level at which our selves do continue on forever under a self-alienation scenario even if all our memories, plans, attachments, hopes, and beliefs must eventually get eradicated and then replaced if we are to evade boredom?
I don’t think so. As I also argued in Chapter 3, I get my sense of my past continuity, if not my future continuity, precisely from the memories, experiences, beliefs, attachments, commitments, and the like that I have previously had. And so in a perpetual self-alienation scenario, even if my future looks endless my past will not seem to be growing at all. After all, my sense of a continuing self will go back only as far as the beginning of my current cycle of memories, perceptions, hopes, attachments, feelings, and desires. In fact, as a recurrently self-alienating immortal, I might grow to resent the ever-increasing loss of my past in the way that I now, as a mortal, resent the ever-shrinking magnitude of my future. Certainly, under a self-alienation scenario, I wouldn’t have a sense of the endlessly lengthening life span that defines immortality.
True, if as an immortal I somehow did care about my self retrospectively—not just prospectively—as a bare subject, then yes, I would feel as if I had been living for an increasingly long period of time regardless of whatever complete turnover in my memories, thoughts, feelings, and desires had occurred in the past. But then if I did care about my self retrospectively as a bare ongoing subject, that would also mean, mortal that I currently am, that I would feel badly that I wasn’t born earlier and that my bare subject was thus cheated out of much prenatal time, even though, had I been born in 1756 instead of 1956, and so tacked an extra two centuries onto the front of my existence, I would have had an entirely different life in terms of my memories, desires, experiences, and attachments. But of course, most of us don’t resent the fact that we weren’t born earlier than we were; after all, what matters to our sense of continuity when we look backward is precisely the particular memories, thoughts, feelings, and experiences we have had. Retrospectively, I certainly wouldn’t want to trade the particular memories, attachments, feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and aspirations that I have had for whatever set I might have possessed had I been born an extra two hundred years earlier. That truly would be self-alienation.
For some good related discussion, see Christopher Belshaw, Annihilation: The Sense and Significance of Death (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2009), 162; Frederick Kaufman, “Pre-Vital and Post-Mortem Non-Existence,” in Life, Death, and Meaning: Key Philosophical Readings on the Big Questions, ed. David Benatar (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), 243.
Chapter 11. A Wistful Backward Glance
1. Thomas Dodman, “Homesick Epoch: Dying of Nostalgia in Post-Revolutionary France” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2011), 18.
2. Frank Colby, “Again,” New York Times, March 25, 1949.
3. Theodore Hall, “No End of Books,” Washington Post, November 18, 1935.
4. Hans Jonas, Mortality and Morality: A Search for Good After Auschwitz (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 97–98.
5. Ibid., 98.
6. Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (New York: Vintage, 2004), 31, 33.
7. Laura Esquivel, Malinche (New York: Washington Square, 2007), 18.
8. Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (New York: Vintage, 2006), 248–49.
9. Hilton Als, “Close to You,” New Yorker, December 16, 2013, 90.
10. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 53.
11. Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), xxviii.
12. Bernard Levin, The Pendulum Years: Britain in the Sixties (Cambridge: Icon, 2003), 409.
Chapter 12. Making the Sun Run
1. Martha Nussbaum, “The Damage of Death: Incomplete Arguments and False Consolations,” in The Metaphysics and Ethics of Death, ed. James S. Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 40.
2. Charla Muller, 365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy (London: John Blake, 2010).
3. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, 318: “He would gaze at her searchingly, trying to recapture the charm which he had once seen in her and no longer finding it.”
4. Ibid., 341.
5. Ibid., 578: In memory “two equal superimposed figures [can] appear to be one, whereas, to give our happiness its full meaning, we would rather preserve . . . all those separate points of our desire, at the very moment in which we succeed in touching them.”
6. Frank Arntzenius, Space, Time, & Stuff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 20.
7. Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 199.
8. Douwe Draaisma, Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 214.
9. In Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception (New York: Harper Collins, 2013), 459, Claudia Hammond notes that during certain terrifying incidents—Hammond is thinking of someone hit by a car, flying through the air—time seems to slow down. As Hammond says, “The mind focuses on the elements of a situation necessary for survival and filters out anything inessential such as the scenery, the songs changing on the radio or the number of cars that pass. These are the cues which would normally help to assess the time passing.” As I interpret this observation it means that, normally, certain events in our lives—those that assume a regular periodicity—become background units or measures of time, substitutes for actually consulting the clock. But in unusual situations, like a car accident or (as the neuroscientist David Eagleman has shown) a jump from a tower, this kind of regular event falls away because of our intense focus on the extraordinary events that are unfolding. Those extraordinary events, then, necessarily become the units by which we implicitly gauge the amount of passing time. But due to the intensity of our focus there seem to be more of them, or we remember more of their detail. We see each blade of grass we pass over, each brick of the tower as we fall or fly through the air. And so we think more time is passing than we normally would. This may be why, in such extraordinary situations, as Hammond puts it, “the combination of the plethora of memories and the absence of [normal] clues to time passing is enough to make time decelerate.”
So people in such highly stressed situations use events (passing by each individual blade or brick during their flight or fall) as units of time. And for them, counting time by those “units”—and since their senses are heightened, they perceive many more such units than usual during their flight or fall through the air—it takes more time for that fall or flight to elapse for them than it would for someone on the ground timing it with a stopwatch, and counting with units of seconds. And yes, when one person takes more units of time than another to complete an event, the event, for him, will have passed more slowly. But that doesn’t mean that when one person packs more events into a unit of time, as does Marvell’s lover, it will go more slowly. It won’t.
Likewise, a jam-packed vacation that seems to go by quickly at the time can seem to have been a long one in retrospect. That’s precisely because, once it’s over, we use the unusually large number of events it contained as units of time to measure its duration. See Draaisma, Why Life Speeds Up, 214.
10. And yet maybe, the philosopher Roy Sorensen claims, it would indeed be possible for a person to pack an infinite number of events into a limited amount of time and experience it as an immortal life. Let’s suppose, Sorensen says, that our life is just two minutes long. But thanks to some sort of magic, during the first minute we live what seems to us to be a full day, in that it contains all the events we would experience in a normal day. During the next half-minute, we cram in a second day’s events. During the next quarter minute, we go through a third day’s events. During the next eighth of a minute, a fourth day’s. And so on. According to what Sorensen calls “external” time, our life is limited to two minutes. But according to our own “
personal” time, how it feels to us, our life is endless. “That’s far better than death,” Sorensen says, “and indeed it is about as good as immortality.” See “The Cheated God: Death and Personal Time,” Analysis 65:2 (2005): 119–25.
It’s true that from a personal perspective—from the perspective of someone living such a life—it would seem endless, assuming he or she remained wholly unaware of external time. But if that’s the right perspective, then the entire discussion of external time is irrelevant. It’s interesting that Sorensen locates this “external time” at a spatial distance from the person in question, in some other “region of the universe.” After all, it’s difficult to understand what it could mean for two dimensions of time to exist simultaneously for the same people in the same place. But if external time is truly elsewhere, then the two minutes it clocks are utterly irrelevant to the person himself. What we really have is simply a case of immortality pure and simple, not immortality within the confines of a mortal life. Even now, it may very well be that a civilization in some far warped corner of the universe actually is living at a tempo at which time has passed at a rate of one minute for one earth day, then half a minute for one earth day, then a quarter of a minute for one earth day, etc. But so what? It would have no relevance for our life experience, mortal or immortal.
But set that aside. There’s another problem. If one personal day truly takes one external minute to transpire, and the next personal day takes half an external minute, and the next personal day takes a quarter of an external minute, then the personal days can’t be understood as units of time. We don’t, after all, say that one meter equals 1.09 yards, and the next meter equals 0.545 yards, and the next meter equals 0.2725 yards, and so on. Instead, we can understand such personal days only as events in time, not units of it. That way it makes at least conceptual sense to say that a certain number of events (a normal day’s worth) take one minute to transpire, and then we ramp things up and they take a half-minute, and then we ramp things up even more and they take a quarter-minute, and so on. But in that case, time speeds up—maybe, asymptotically, to infinity. It doesn’t slow down, making us feel immortal.