The Consolations of Mortality
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11. See Nick Bostrom, “Why I Want to Be a Posthuman When I Grow Up,” in The Transhumanist Reader, ed. Max More (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 41.
12. See “Flow, the Secret to Happiness,” at TED Talks, October 23, 2008, http://www.ted.com/speakers/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi.
13. See Kendra Cherry, “What Is Flow? Understanding the Psychology of Flow,” About Health, December 16, 2014, http://psychology.about.com/od/PositivePsychology/a/flow.htm.
14. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 53.
15. Michael Frayn, A Landing on the Sun (New York: Picador, 2003), 150.
16. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), 379–80.
17. Science fiction presents few appealing images of immortality. One writer who is said to at least make an attempt at such a vision is Roger Zelazny, whom a critic describes thusly: “Certainly Zelazny does not believe that humanity is too limited to use immortality . . . humans need not fear becoming stale with the passage of time if they remember to keep in touch with the changing yet eternal universe around them. There will always be surprises waiting. People need not fear being cut off from familiar surroundings, since they ultimately are the centers of their own worlds, free to shape surroundings to fit themselves.” Zelazny, on this reading, seems to think that there is a happy path between continuity and change that immortals can negotiate. (See Joseph Sander, “Immortality in Roger Zelazny,” in Death and the Serpent: Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Carl B. Yoke and Donald M. Hassler [Westport: Greenwood, 1985], 142.) Personally, I find this take on Zelazny’s work a little too optimistic; it seems to me that he is more dryly ironic about the possibilities for finding an optimal mix of change—enough to escape boredom—and continuity—enough to elude nostalgia and self-alienation—in immortal life. One of his immortal characters, Srin Shtigo, is asked, “Does your taste in art run to the monolithic?” “Occasionally,” comes the reply (Roger Zelazny, This Immortal [New York: Ibooks, 2004], 57).
18. Another way of conceiving an ideal immortality is that it would endlessly alternate between exciting episodes—the excitement of quest and adventure—and peaceful periods: periods in which, our most recent quest or adventure successfully completed, we would relax and enjoy the pleasures of tranquility. But why do we like the idea of switching from one to the other? Why not just an endless stream of exciting quests? Or why not endlessly enjoy the pleasures of tranquility? Presumably because, as many a thinker has observed, we know that the excitement of the quest has an unpleasant flip side: the heart-racing anxiety of not knowing how it will turn out, which makes us yearn for tranquility. But periods of tranquility have their own unpleasant flip side too: the boredom of nothing happening, which makes us desperate for excitement.
All of this poses a problem for any ideal immortality scenario on which excitement and tranquility obligingly alternate. The problem is that their darker siblings of anxiety and boredom would sooner or later gain the upper hand. Why? Consider that excitement and tranquility have to do with speed of movement over space. Excitement’s synonyms include hurry, flurry, motion, and commotion. Tranquility’s include inactivity, motionlessness, being at a standstill. And so excitement and tranquility are opposites: you can’t be both in motion and motionless at the same time. Anxiety and boredom, by contrast, each carry the connotation less of spatial movement than of temporal duration. Boredom is related to interminability. It increases as the time passes since our last bout of excitement. Anxiety is related to anticipation. It increases with the time that must pass before we can finally rest in tranquil contentment, our quest completed. And so while one cannot be both tranquil and excited at the same time, one can certainly be both bored and anxious at the same time. Lengthening boredom makes us mountingly anxious for it to end. Unremitting anxiety can make us crazy with the fatigue and ennui that define boredom. There is, then, reason to think that as time passes, the psychological arc of immortality would bend away from the lovely vision of alternating excitement and tranquility, and toward their ill-boding mates, anxiety and boredom.
19. Michael Oakeshott, Notebooks, 1922–86 (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2010), 332.
Interlude. Mortality Versus Immortality
1. Jay Rosenberg, Thinking Clearly About Death (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998).
2. Bernard Shaw, Back To Methuselah (London: Constable, 1931), 130; see also Nicholas Agar, Humanity’s End (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010), ch. 6.
Chapter 13. The Big Sleep
1. Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard (New York: Pantheon, 1960), 292.
2. When, in This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 19, Harold Brodkey imagines death as “silence,” he finds it appealing. Notably, Elizabeth, the figure representing Death in Edward Albee’s play Lady from Dubuque (New York: Atheneum, 1980), 157–58, describes a “dream about dying” as involving “light and silence”—because she wants to make death attractive. “Light and silence” also characterizes the evidently welcoming “near-death” experience that has been so much studied of late.
3. There are, certainly, some literary images that render darkness appealing. The two most famous may well be Shakespeare’s “When he shall die/take him and cut him out into stars/and he shall make the face of heaven so fine/that all the world will be in love with night/ and pay no worship to the garish sun,” from Romeo and Juliet, and Robert Frost’s “The woods are lovely, dark and deep/but I have promises to keep/and miles to go before I sleep/and miles to go before I sleep.” Interestingly, Robert F. Kennedy used both of these quotations in his tribute to his late brother at the Democratic National Convention in 1964. In Shakespeare’s lines, though, as Kennedy’s usage makes clear, it is the night’s lights—the stars—and not its darkness that make it appealing. As for Frost’s dark woods, they are lovely in a sublime kind of way—lovely, that is, only because the traveler knows he will avoid them, not that they await him. In any event, Frost himself said that the woods are not a metaphor for death. See Louis Mertins, Robert Frost: Life and Talks-Walking (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965), 371.
Some morbid literary images, conversely, make silence seem unappealing. On close inspection, though, the silence concerned isn’t equated with death per se. In The Gay Science (New York: Anchor, 1956), bk. 4 sec. 278, Nietzsche talks about the “deathly silence” that descends on those who have died, but he is speaking of our experience of the dead, not of the deceased’s experience of death. It makes sense to say that the dead are silent to us, not dark to us. For T. S. Eliot, in “East Coker,” we all eventually enter into darkness, while silence, though sad, is equated not with death but with the funeral.
4. All quotations are from Lucretius: On the Nature of Things, trans. William Ellery Leonard (London: Dent, 1921); see also Lucretius: On the Nature of Things, trans. Martin Ferguson Smith (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1969), 90; and Lucretius, The Nature of Things, trans. A. E. Stallings (London: Penguin, 2007), 104–5. Lucretius’s static imagery in these verses is particularly telling, since for him the universe is comprised of atoms in perpetual motion. And interestingly, the only figure whom Lucretius’s verses do explicitly cast as moving forward in time—as running the course of his life—is Epicurus.
5. See “The Vanity of Existence,” in Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism: A Series of Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 35–39.
Chapter 14. Stardust and Moonshine
1. Philip Roth, Everyman (New York: Vintage, 2007), 182.
2. Philip Larkin, “Aubade,” in Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004).
3. Hans Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 165.
4. Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” March 1993, https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html.
5. See Ra
y Kurzweil, “Superintelligence and Singularity,” in Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, ed. Susan Schneider (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 202–5.
6. John R. Searle, “Can Information Theory Explain Consciousness?” New York Review of Books, January 10, 2013, 54–55, 58.
7. Margaret Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet (New York: Norton, 2010), 247.
8. Raymond Kurzweil, “Live Forever,” Psychology Today 33 (January–February 2000): 66–71; see also Kurzweil, “Superintelligence,” 216. As with Borges’s aleph, in cosmic consciousness, we are told, the entire contents of the universe would be perceivable from every conceivable angle in a single “all-encompassing gaze” (Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-Modern Science Fiction [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993], 303). In other words, we will all occupy the same synoptic position in space, just as we currently occupy the same synchronic moment in time. And so, in effect, there would be no more “we,” only one single universal perspective.
9. Daniel M. Wegner, “Don’t Fear the Cybermind,” New York Times, August 4, 2012.
10. William James, Memories and Studies (Rockville, Md.: Arc Manor, 2008), 84.
11. February 13, 2013, http://sptimmortality.blogspot.ca/2013/02/notes-on-our-sixth-meeting.html.
12. The Age of Spiritual Machines (New York: Viking, 1999), 237.
13. Linda Griffiths, Maggie and Pierre & The Duchess (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2013), 51.
14. Benjamin Busch, Dust to Dust: A Memoir (New York: Ecco, 2012), 295.
15. See Abou Ali Farman Farmaian, “Secular immortal” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2012), 488–89.
Chapter 15. Every Time I Say Goodbye, I Die a Little
1. Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (New York: Vintage, 2006), 197.
2. Adam Phillips, Darwin’s Worms (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 117–18.
3. “The Listener,” The Independent, December 5, 1999, 50.
4. John Updike, “New York Girl,” in Licks of love (New York: Ballantine, 2000), 43.
5. Jim Crace, Being Dead (New York: Picador, 2001), 179.
6. Charles Hartshorne, “A Philosophy of Death,” in Philosophical Aspects of Thanatology, ed. F. H. Hetzler, J. Gutman, and A. H. Kutscher (New York: MSS Information Corporation, 1978), 2:81.
7. Joanne Kaufman, “Comfortable Ms. Clooney at 65, Rosemary Is Finally at Peace,” Cincinnati Post, February 28, 1994.
8. Victor Brombert, Musings on Mortality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 73.
9. Logan Hill, “Spike Lee: Still Gliding to Success,” New York Times, November 20, 2013.
10. Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (New York: Penguin, 2000), 520.
11. J. David Velleman, “So It Goes,” The Amherst Lecture in Philosophy (2006), http://www.amherstlecture.org/velleman2006/velleman2006_ALP.pdf, 18–19.
12. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 155; see also The Letters of Oscar Wilde (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962), 457: “Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons.”
13. See, e.g., Denis Bates Enos, “The Long Goodbye,” Orlando Sentinel, March 2, 2008.
14. Just as it’s psychologically possible to treat events as objects—or as people—and mourn them when they perish, it’s possible to treat objects—or people—as events, and feel wistful about them as they, or more exactly the various stages of their lives, disappear into the past. In Paul Harding’s Tinkers (New York: Bellevue, 2009), 133, George says of his father, “I had lately noticed him looking at me with a sort of wistfulness, as if he were not looking at me, but at a drawing or photograph of me, as if he were remembering me.”
15. The character Ludwik Szatera, in Stefan Grabinski’s story “Szatera’s Engrams” (In Sarah’s House: Stories [London: CB Editions, 2007]), treats events as if they were objects, and so replaces wistfulness with grief: “He could never come to terms with the eternal passage of men, objects and events. Each moment inexorably turning into the past was to him precious, invaluable, and he witnessed its passing with a sense of inexpressible regret.”
16. Leon Kass, Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity (San Francisco: Encounter, 2002), 267.
17. Arthur Miller, That Championship Season, 126.
Conclusion
1. Peter N. Miller, “How Objects Speak,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Au gust 15, 2014, B9.
2. T. Coraghessan Boyle, “The Relive Box,” New Yorker, March 17, 2014, 65.
INDEX
accomplishments: early in life, 23–25, 32–34, 37–42, 45–46, 54, 83–86, 94, 223–24; memorials and, 105, 108; self-effacement and, 58–60
Ackerman, Diane, 88–89
admirer vs. admired, 208
afterlife, 1, 3, 128
aging, 7–8, 111–12, 219–21, 227–29
Ahasuerus, King (biblical), 106, 107
Aiken, Kimberly, 38–39
Albee, Edward, Lady from Dubuque, 259n2
alienation. See self-alienation
Allen, Woody: Midnight in Paris, 169; Sleeper, 178
Als, Hilton, 174
ancient world, 1, 42, 47–48, 56, 158, 176
Andre, Harvie, 205, 208
Angstrom, Harry (“Rabbit”) (fictional), 106, 107
anxiety, 2, 28, 31, 37, 42, 60, 87, 132, 145, 162, 163, 202, 226, 231, 236n24, 239n25, 258n18
arc of life, 83–88, 89
arena of presence, 128–32
Ariès, Philippe, 14–15
Aristotle, 47, 144
Arntzenius, Frank, 182
Ashbee, Barry, 99–100
Athill, Diane, Somewhere Towards the End, 89
athlete’s number. See jersey retiring
Attlee, Clement, 175
Austerlitz, Jacques (fictional), 108
authentic self, 54, 71, 72, 78, 79, 80, 88, 91, 92, 95, 151, 246n42
“Babe” (song), 86
Bacon, Francis, 47
Bailey, George (fictional), 76, 77, 78
Bailey, Nat, 134–36, 137, 138, 140, 143–44, 145
Ballard, J. G., Miracles of Life, 156–57
bankruptcy, 241n25
Barnes, Julian, 73–74, 101
baseball, 99, 100, 134–35, 136
basketball, 32, 37–38, 39, 99
Beatles, 2–3
Beauvoir, Simone de, All Men Are Mortal, 233–34n10
Becker, Ernest, The Denial of Death, 14, 15
Bell, Gordon, 4, 100, 101, 102, 103, 108–9, 110, 145, 230
Bellow, Saul, “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” 151
benign, death as, 11, 20, 21, 28, 94, 95, 212, 226, 230, 239n25
Benigni, Roberto, Life is Beautiful, 76–77, 78
Bergson, Henri, 239n25
Bernstein, Mr. (fictional), 75, 165
Bettman, Gary, 106
“big sleep,” 7, 197–99
Biju (fictional), 173
Binchy, Maeve, 160
birth, darkness prior to, 199, 200, 201, 202
Biz’menkov (fictional), 13–14
Blake, William, 114
Blattner, William, 93
Bloom, Molly (fictional), 164, 165, 166
Boggs, Wade, 59
boredom, 91, 151–57, 158–60, 180, 181, 182, 192, 227, 228, 258n18; classifications/characterizations of, 151; flow vs., 186; imagery for, 154–56; spatial vs. temporal, 154–57; two strains of, 151–52. See also under immortality
Borg, Björn, 23
Boston Celtics, 99
Bostrom, Nick, 186, 187
Bowen, Christopher, 86
Boyle, T. Coraghessan, “The Relive Box,” 229
Boym, Svetlana, 174
Bozeman (Montana), 41
Bradley, Ben, 23
Brodkey, Harold, 123, 197; The Wild Darkness, 259n2
Brodsky, Joseph, 123
Brombert, Victor, 217
Bronfman, Ed
gar, Jr., 127
Brooklyn Nets, 99
Brooks, Garth, 58
Brooks, Mel, 215
bucket lists, 70–74, 81, 84; definition of, 70; relationship to existentialist consolation, 74
Buddenbrook, Thomas (fictional), 53
Buddha, 64
Buddhist consolation, 2, 3, 52–69, 95, 128, 131, 230, 240–41n16; critics of, 55–56
Bush, George H. W., 59
Cactus Records, 41
Camus, Albert, The Outsider, 154–55
Čapek, Karel, The Makropoulos Secret, 156
Capra, Frank, It’s a Wonderful Life, 76, 77, 78
career: lateral transfer and, 127; peak of, 83–86, 87; regrets and, 115, 116; retirement and, 99, 241n25
car racing, 242n25
Cather, Willa, 205
chain, life as a, 3, 65–69, 94–95
championship, 38, 41, 49, 49–50, 224, 229
Chapin, Harry, 216
Chappell, Timothy, 158–59
Chateaubriand, François-René de, 160
Cherry, Kendra, 186
Chulkaturin (fictional), 13–14
Churchill, Winston, 113, 138–39, 140, 141, 174–75; My Early Life, 26–27
Chuzzlewit, Martin (fictional), 111
Citizen Kane (film), 75, 165
Clanchy, Kate, 213
Claudian, 79
Clinton, Bill, 41
Clooney, Rosemary, 215
closure, 116, 123, 125, 145–46
Coach (fictional), 224, 229
Cobain, Kurt, 85
Coetzee, J. M., Elizabeth Costello, 100–101, 102
“Cold Gin” (song), 87
Collins, Francis, 8
comparative deprivation, 237n7
computers, 127, 204–5, 211. See also digitized life-log
Concise Biographical Dictionary, 133
Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, 198
consciousness, 7, 128, 203–7, 213; loss of, 197, 210–11. See also cosmic consciousness
consolations, 1–8, 95, 146, 189–90, 211–12; conflicts between, 32; four streams of, 1–7, 55; Johnston and, 53, 128–29, 130–32, 146; Larkin and, 203. See also Buddhist consolation; Epicurus; existentialist consolation; Holderlin strategy