“Escape velocity,” Aubrey says, with satisfaction: “it’s a bit of a glib phrase but I think it does the job as well as any other pair of words.”
His faith in the coming of a new millennium pushes Aubrey even farther out into the dark—or into the boggy fringes of his field, where the footing is treacherous. It puts him at odds with all the conventional gerontologists who talk about adding just a few more comfortable years to our lives. This conservatism of theirs is what he rails against, above the babble of voices in the Eagle. Most gerontologists are so timid! They’re happy to trumpet such a modest research program. They’re happy to agree with the assumption that we can’t live forever. “Most other people are using this as a funding strategy!” he cries indignantly. “So it means that we have repulsively political phrases like, ‘Our goal is adding life to years, rather than years to life.’ I mean, I throw up when I hear that! I have no words to describe my disgust for that.” His delivery is astonishingly quick, as if he were dashing madly upstream with water sheathing and coating the rocks. “They think it’s going to be what politicians want to hear—what purse-string holders want to hear. And that is what they want to hear. But the fact is, it’s a lie!”
And he gives his listeners a cosmic look that says: The victory is infinitely great and just ahead. Follow me!
So, early one summer morning I took a train from London, and Aubrey took a train from Cambridge, and we met at Stansted Airport for a flight to Forlì.
The ticket line was moving slowly, and while we waited I studied the posters overhead. In an ad for Luxury Hilton holidays, a young woman stands at the beach in a red bikini—laughing. And in an ad for Vodaphone, two young men stand at the beach, laughing, with two young women on their backs, also laughing. The women are talking to each other on their cell phones. And the caption is: “How are you?” Another ad, aimed at a more staid crowd, is for Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy: “Fuel for your Spiritual Journey.” There is a testimonial from a middle-aged man, L. Rodriguez, business entrepreneur: “I felt so unsure about the future…until I read this book.”
Aubrey had arrived at the airport before me, and he’d already bought his ticket. He looked a bit testy as he waited for me to get mine. “The trouble is, you’re costing me valuable drinking time,” he said at last. We arranged to meet in the airport bar.
When I found him again, the sight of him there at the bar gave me pause. Most of the time, I marveled at and was amused by his drinking. He carried it off with so much dash that I rarely questioned it. When Aubrey first told me about his work in Pennsylvania we’d talked for a day and a half. On the second day there was already a powerful yeasty smell in the room from the day before. My study smelled as sour as an old pub. I couldn’t help counting when I cleaned up: eighteen bottles of beer.
Now Aubrey glanced up from his little round table at the airport bar and smiled. His mood had improved. “It’s days like this that I feel particularly gratified that I don’t need breakfast,” he said.
On the plane to Forlì, Aubrey showed me the latest issue of Fortune. It included a profile of Aubrey, with photos. “The Fortune photographer had a business card with a list of the famous people he’s photographed,” he said cheerfully. “So my ambition is to get on that list.”
We landed in Forlì and set off to find the bar where he’d had his idea. To pass the time as we walked through the streets, Aubrey asked me riddles. How many three-letter words could I think of for parts of the human body? The sun was so much brighter in Italy than in England that the black asphalt looked white. A woman on a motorbike whizzed past us, smiling and saying into a cell phone: “Pronto. Pronto.”—“Hello. Hello.” We passed alleys and shuttered stone buildings that looked blind. Pigeons in a dry fountain, on the corso della Repubblica. The long lane was like the long straight shot from birth to death that people can see from here, in the old Italian sun. The churches and stone walls seemed to be exerting gravity, as if they would pull you down, as certainly as falling. Apparently Aubrey was not susceptible to these suggestions. The novelist Shirley Hazzard has written, “In Italy we learn…that the ability to rise to the moment, to the human occasion, is linked to a sense of mortality” but in Italy Aubrey had drawn the opposite conclusion, that we might escape from death’s gravitational pull once and for all.
The scene of Aubrey’s vision, when we found it, was nondescript: just a coffee shop with a few scrappy tables outside. Potted plants in concrete marked out a small space on the asphalt for the tables. But the place was closed for the month of August. The windows of the shop were papered up with local newspaper. A cupboard the owners were throwing out or trying to give away stood by the door. Aubrey leaned against it in the shade. An old man passed on a bicycle. Across the street there was a newsstand, and a joint called Blue’s Bar. The life-giving, carcinogenic sunshine was intense now: steep noon Mediterranean sun. Roosters crowed from an overgrown backyard.
Aubrey explained that he’d sat outside that day, facing the street. He’d ordered a Tuborg. It came in a very large bottle—which must have been a liter bottle. “A young woman served me. I can say ‘Birra.’” There was only one type of beer. The place was basically a coffee shop. “It was pretty deserted—I was the only person here. The temperature was warm, but not uncomfortable. I was grateful for the beer.
“I was on my second one when I had my critical idea. I didn’t need another one after that, because I knew it was an important idea, and I was pretty happy. I just exclaimed to myself, then got up and walked in a jaunty manner in the direction of the airport.”
I told Aubrey I found it interesting that he had arrived at his secular vision of paradise in the place where Dante wrote his own—a fabled place in the history of human yearnings toward immortality. But to Aubrey, the setting seemed to be a matter of complete indifference. Nothing in Tuscany seemed to have impressed him on his passage through the first time, either. When I asked him what he remembered, he said, “It was really a rather uneventful meeting. Perhaps that’s what cleared my brain afterward.”
At my suggestion, we had planned to visit some of the great mosaic-lined churches of Ravenna after our stop in Forlì. We found a bus in the center of town. I pressed Aubrey again about events surrounding the meeting. He did vaguely remember an opera singer. “I just could not believe so much noise could come out of two lungs! Obviously impossible. And she was a little girl as well. Adelaide’s size, if that.” When I pressed him some more, he grew impatient. “There were a couple of interesting places, certainly. Old palaces.”
He doesn’t like to travel; he doesn’t like to eat; he doesn’t have time for anything but drink and work, although his immortality project forces him to trot around the globe. He looked lanky, even skeletal, loping along through the streets of Ravenna. He got a lot of long, frank, solemn stares from children under five, but he did not seem to notice. “That’s right,” he said, in one square, “we ate most of our meals here. I’d completely forgotten that till I saw that repulsive tablecloth.”
Aubrey isn’t particularly interested in children himself. In any case, there are fewer children on the streets in Italy and in much of Europe than there used to be. As people around the world live longer, many of them decide to have fewer children. At the turn of the third millennium, seventeen countries in Europe recorded more deaths than births, notes the demographer Paul Demeny: Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Sweden, and Ukraine. Around the world, birthrates have dropped from six per family in 1972 to a bit less than half that now, and some of the lowest birthrates anywhere on Earth are to be found in the cities of Italy. In some Italian towns, the rate is less than one.
“A lot of people point out overpopulation,” Aubrey likes to say, when anyone brings up that objection to his immortality project. This will matter in principle, he says—but we woudn’t have a big problem with too many children for a hundred years. In fact,
people might wise up and not bother with them for an indefinite number of years. “Another way of looking at it—who cares? This is the way I like to look at it,” Aubrey says. “We’ve got a chance of saving people’s lives—and we have to do that. Letting people die is bad in the same way killing people is bad. So we’ve got to do it. Even if we needed severe birth-control measures. So we have to do it. And people are very shocked when I say that. Especially when it goes further—when it means we’ll end up in a world with more or less no children. Get over it! And people are not happy with that. But I don’t know. Maybe it’s just my personality, but I prefer to cut the crap and get to the chase.”
We walked to Ravenna’s Museo Nazionale. The cobblestones were gritty with gravel, and the marble steps were worn as smooth as stones on a beach. “My mother’s so good to me,” Aubrey said, stopping at the museum gift shop. She didn’t ask him to visit often. “Her one condition is that I send her a postcard from wherever I go. And I’m enormously religious about it.”
I flipped over his postcard and read the caption aloud to him: “Vault and Lunette with Good Shepherd.”
“I don’t spend much time choosing which postcard to send,” said Aubrey.
Headless marble torsos loomed over us, attached to marble pedestals by hooks of steel, and then a life-size Christ, crucified: a great wooden Y. I asked Aubrey if he had gone to church as a boy. He said his mother had raised him as an Anglican. “She used to send me to church once a month. She gradually started going less and less. By the time I was ten, we went just at Christmas and Easter.” At the time of his confirmation, he was a student at Harrow, a school in northwest London that has been educating boys since the year 1243. “It was a complete nonevent as I recall. I don’t go as an adult. Churches are emptying out, to a large extent.”
I asked him if he ever wondered why that might be.
“Not my area of expertise, your honor.” He snorted and blew air out through his lips.
The courtyard of the Museo Nazionale looked a little like courtyards at the University of Cambridge. “We don’t have so many fragments there,” said Aubrey. “Then again, our things are only about one-third as old.”
Ravenna was the capital of the Western Roman Empire. It was also the capital of the Kingdom of the Ostrogoths.
And when the Byzantine emperor Justinian retook a piece of the boot of Italy, he kept Ravenna as his capital. As a port on the Adriatic Sea, it was a convenient place from which to sail to Byzantium. During Justinian’s reign many of the famous mosaics were made, enclosed in plain brick churches, like souls inside bodies. Yeats called the mosaics “monuments of unaging intellect” in his great late poem “Sailing to Byzantium.”
“You realize that if ages stretch as you predict, then these antiquities become meaningless,” I said.
“That is my ambition,” said Aubrey. “I look forward to that.” He discreetly checked his watch.
Aubrey and I wandered, to his growing disgust, through the churches of Ravenna. In the Tomb of Galla Placidia, stags (representing souls) drank from a mystic fountain encircled by curlicues of greenery, as if all life had turned into music. Dante’s heart would have been touched by these scenes as he finished his Divine Comedy, in exile from Florence, during the last four years of his life. His epitaph concludes: “Here I lie buried, Dante, exile from my birthplace, a son of Florence, that loveless mother.”
At the Basilica of San Vitale I pointed out the peacocks that face each other on a stone sarcophagus. There were rows of them, symbols of immortality, waiting for resurrection. And then there were still more symbols of eternity and immortality: mosaic birds at a mosaic fountain. The church was built when the Goths were still in Rome. Among the pillars and the groin vaults of the chancel, the Lamb of God was framed in a wreath against a night sky full of gold and silver stars.
“Well, they’re fixated, really, in this place, aren’t they,” said Aubrey, with a donnish drawl. “Can’t imagine why.” That killing drawl—that slight rasp of the blade. I asked him if he’d learned it in college.
“It’s sort of more Harrow than Cambridge,” Aubrey said.
“It’s like the drop shot in tennis,” I said.
“A part of my national heritage.”
While I admired San Vitale, he settled himself in a pew to wait for me. A chair fell over somewhere in the church with an echoing crash. Then the organ began with a portentous chord, another crash. Aubrey glanced at me with an eyebrow drolly cocked. The chords of the organ went rolling like the waves that washed the marbles smooth—groaning and building toward some great convulsion to which fewer and fewer would aspire. Aubrey had bowed his head as if in prayer. When I offered him a penny for his thoughts, he said he was hatching plans to raise the circulation rate of his journal, Rejuvenation Research.
As we walked on from church to church through the streets of Ravenna, facing into our own lengthening shadows, Aubrey diverted himself by wrapping up the riddles of the day. In Wonderland, the Mad Hatter asks Alice a riddle without an answer. “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” But in Aubrey’s world, puzzles are made to be answered, and I should answer the questions he’d put to me that morning: How many three-letter words for parts of the human body? (Answer: nine—arm, leg, eye, ear, jaw, gut, toe, lip, and hip.) Now, in the sinking sun, the failing light, he just wanted to go home.
I’d hoped to find Dante’s tomb before we left, but Aubrey was getting very tired and sulky. “Maybe, I think, we’ve seen it,” he said. “They all look the same after a while.”
Our last stop was the Baptistery of the Arians (“sometimes called the Neonian Baptistery in honor of Bishop Neon who had it decorated during the middle of the fifth century”). Aubrey remembered it vaguely—he’d stayed next to it. According to my guidebook, it was probably an old Roman bath. The Nymphaeum was decorated with mosaics at the order of Bishop Neon sometime after 452. Directly above, on the ceiling, Jesus was baptized in the Jordan, with a dove descending. Aubrey took a chair with a little groan of pleasure and a smothered yawn. The other tourists around us craned their heads up, and he let his own head fall back, too.
The ceiling was said to have inspired Dante’s vision of Paradise. Jesus Christ is baptized at the very top of the dome, in the medallion in the center. All the mosaics and the architectural elements are arranged beautifully to lift your eyes toward that central medallion. The dome is circular. The interior includes apses, arches, columns, windows, niches, porticoes, spandrels, mosaics of thrones and altars. The spandrels are decorated with mosaics of the Prophets and tendrils of acanthus. In the scene within the medallion, against a background of gold, there is a rocky riverbank with radiant flowers, the blue water of the Jordan. A river god holds a green towel to dry off Jesus. The river god has green hair and beard, and a green staff, along with the green beach towel.
High up in the dome, Saint Peter and Saint Paul lead the Apostles, dressed in gold and silver tunics, in solemn procession. They seem to go around and around like one of the “eternal wheels” that Dante saw in the dome of heaven, and the medallion seems to spin like a cosmic pinwheel.
Below the medallion, in his chair, Aubrey looked almost martyred. His face was pale. His cheeks were hollow. His beard hung a good distance down his chest. It was a better beard than John the Baptist’s; longer than the beards of the Apostles; much longer than the beard of the young Moses on his hike up Mount Sinai, where he pauses to relace his sandal.
Well, why would Aubrey be moved by any of these saints and sages in their holy fire? Aubrey has his own hopes. We are hurtling toward a sort of technological supernova, an intelligence explosion, a Singularity. The Singularity will bring a golden age. Not long ago, he wrote an online paean to the Singularity in which he concluded, “Humanity will at that point be in a state of complete satisfaction with its condition: complete identity with its deepest goals. Human nature will at last be revealed.”
To Aubrey, the failure of our collective will, of our human nerve, is the grea
test obstacle to the achievement of escape velocity. Our blindness to what we can be is what prevents us from moving toward the Singularity. We are the weakest link.
The pilgrims and tourists in the church made their way around him where he sat. They glanced at him, at his pallor and hollow cheeks, and they averted their eyes as if here must be a man who was more serious about immortality than they.
The swirling gold world in the mosaics around them suggested grace, and chaotic snake rings of gold against the black—grace unfolding against the blackness of space or the intense inanity of nothingness, not-being. In his weariness, Aubrey looked like one of the saints or hermits come to life—with no time or patience whatever for the world he had just come out of, interested only in the world to which he was going, or hoped to go, the route to the next world. The past held no interest for him, and the present world interested him only as a portal to the next. In that way, at least, he was not unlike the saints and martyrs who regard him just as stiffly from above—returning the gaze of oblivion.
There Aubrey sat with his martyred look, dark, hollow-eyed, and grave—the mark of thought on the pallor of the face. Under the great mosaic dome of the Battistero Neoniano, his head was thrown way back. His eyes were closed, his hands folded.
The pilgrims and tourists tried not to stare at him.
A baby in a stroller gazed at the beard, solemnly fascinated. The parents politely hurried the stroller on by.
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