by Stephen Cave
The James Henry Breasted quote on Akhenaten is taken from Dominic Montserrat’s Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt (Routledge, 2000). The data on blogging is from www.blogpulse.com. The survey of online presence in the United States was conducted by AVG.com in November 2010.
The debate about the plausibility of the bundle theory of the self is an old one, going back at least to David Hume, who proposed it, and his fellow Scot Thomas Reid, who criticized it. The theory and its difficulties are well summarized in Eric Olson’s aforementioned book What Are We?
Roy Baumeister’s views on posterity are from his book Meanings of Life (Guilford Press, 1991). The Marcus Aurelius quote is from his Meditations, available in many editions.
CHAPTER 9: THE IMMORTAL SEED
Although there are countless books on Alexander the Great available, there is only one book-length treatment of his mother that I am aware of: Olympias: Mother of Alexander the Great by Elizabeth Carney (Routledge, 2006).
Einstein’s consoling words are from a letter he wrote to the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes’s widow, February 25, 1926. The Aristotle quote is from De Anima, book 2, chapter 4, translated by J. A. Smith (available online). The Richard Dawkins quote is from his classic The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976), which remains a superb introduction to the gene’s-eye view of life. A good introduction to cells, genes and their role in humans is How We Live and Why We Die by Lewis Wolpert (Faber, 2009).
All quotes by Lynn Margulis are from her excellent book written with Dorion Sagan What Is Life? (University of California Press, 1995), from which the Erasmus Darwin quote is also taken.
The Lucien Lévy-Bruhl quote is taken from Godfrey Lienhardt’s essay “African Representations of Self,” itself to be found in the aforementioned collection The Category of the Person, edited by Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins and Steven Lukes, which contains many other examples of a collectivized sense of self in traditional societies. For further anthropological research on the primacy of the biological immortality narrative, see for example the work of Michael Kearl, much of which is available online, including his contributions to the online Encyclopedia of Death and Dying. The Scipio epitaph is from The Roman Mind by M. L. Clarke (Norton, 1956). Franz Berkenau’s account of the Jewish versus the Hellenic strategy is taken from Zygmunt Bauman’s aforementioned Mortality, Immortality, and Other Life Strategies. John Hick’s similar thoughts are from his paper “The Recreation of the Psycho-Physical Person” (republished in Paul Edwards’s aforementioned book Immortality).
The Fichte quote on German nationalism is also taken from Bauman’s Mortality, Immortality, and Other Life Strategies, which contains an insightful discussion of biological and group immortality narratives. Robert Jay Lifton’s work on revolutionary immortality narratives can be found for example in the aforementioned Living and Dying, written with Eric Olson. The estimate of 170 million people dying in war in the twentieth century is taken from David Livingstone Smith’s The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War (St. Martin’s Press, 2007).
Herbert Spencer promoted the idea of a human superorganism in his essay The Social Organism (1860, available online). The quote on superorganisms from Alison Jolly is taken from her 1999 article in the New Scientist (vol. 2218) “The Fifth Step” and is based on her book Lucy’s Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in Human Evolution (Harvard University Press, 1999).
More on the Gaia hypothesis can be found in any of the books by its originator, James Lovelock, such as The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (Basic Books, 2010). The Ernest Becker quote is once again from The Denial of Death. And a fascinating discussion of catastrophic threats to life on earth can be found in Martin Rees’s aforementioned Our Final Century.
CHAPTER 10: HE WHO SAW THE DEEP
I have used the excellent Penguin Classics (1999) edition of The Epic of Gilgamesh, beautifully translated by Andrew George.
The quotes by Tennyson, William McDougall (quoted also in chapter 6) and C. D. Broad are from Corliss Lamont’s now oft-mentioned The Illusion of Immortality. The Zygmunt Bauman quote is once again from Mortality, Immortality, and Other Life Strategies. The Ernest Becker quote is from Escape from Evil. The Sam Keen quote is from his foreword to the 1997 edition of Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (Free Press). Friedrich Nietzsche’s discussion of Christianity as the “slave morality” can be found in his On the Genealogy of Morals (first published 1887).
The Douglas Adams quote is from the third of the five Hitchhiker books, Life, the Universe and Everything (Pan Books, 1982). Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Immortal” was first published in his collection The Aleph in 1949 (available in translation in a Penguin Modern Classics edition) and can also be found in the Penguin Modern Classics collection of Borges’s work Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Irvin D. Yalom’s experiences of the transformational power of mortality awareness can be found in his books Existential Psychotherapy (Basic Books, 1980) and Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death (Jossey Bass, 2009).
The quote from J. B. Pratt is from his book The Religious Consciousness (Macmillan, 1920). The Alan Segal quote is from his aforementioned Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion, which contains a fascinating discussion of Near Eastern wisdom literature. The quote from the tomb of King Intef is taken from the aforementioned Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt by John H. Taylor. The Michel de Montaigne quote is from his aforementioned essay “To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die.”
Very few of Epicurus’s own writings have survived. The quotes on the fear of death are taken from his “Letter to Menoeceus,” which, like all his surviving works, is short, well worth reading and found in various editions. I have used the translation by John Gaskin in The Epicurean Philosophers (Everyman, 1995). The Shakespeare quote is from Measure for Measure. The Wittgenstein quote is from Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (Routledge, 1921).
The quote from psychologist Roy Baumeister is from his aforementioned Meanings of Life. All quotations and references to Marcus Aurelius are from his Meditations, of which many versions are available. I have mostly used the translation by Maxwell Stanifoth (1964), available from Penguin Books. Meditations is certainly the best surviving insight into Stoic thought. The Bertrand Russell quote is taken from his essay “How to Grow Old” in Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (George Allen, 1956). Irvin D. Yalom’s conclusions on managing death anxiety are in the above-mentioned Staring at the Sun.
Pierre Hadot’s thoughts on the lessons of Epicureanism and Stoicism are from Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (translated by Michael Chase, Blackwell, 1995). The Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi quote is from “The Flow Experience and Its Significance for Human Pyschology” in the book Optimal Experience: Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness (edited by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi, Cambridge University Press, 1988). The Harvard happiness study is reported in the journal Science (“A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind” by Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert 330, no. 6006 ([November 12, 2010], p. 932). Appreciating the present moment is also the core teaching of the bestselling The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle (Hodder, 1999), which draws on many of these wisdom traditions.
The quote by Philodemus is taken from Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life, which contains fascinating discussions of the ancient Greek philosophers’ approach to gratitude and the present moment. Professor Robert Emmons’s conclusions on the power of gratitude are taken from his book Thanks! How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), from which I have also taken the Epictetus quote.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
STEPHEN CAVE holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Cambridge University and, before turning to full-time writing, worked as a diplomat. He writes regularly for the Financial Times and also contributes to the New York Times.
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Stephen Cave, Immortality