The rich, powerful, and important have always tried to circumvent destiny by throwing money at it. But we cannot bribe our way out. PayPal founder and Facebook board member Peter Thiel has invested heavily in foundations dedicated to ending aging. In 2009, he sank millions into a Silicon Valley nanotechnology start-up called Halcyon Molecular. Its founder, William Andregg, told TechCrunch.com he plans to live for “millions, billions, hundreds of billions of years.” Halcyon Molecular quietly went out of business in the summer of 2012. Other technocrats are still trying. Google’s Sergey Brin has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Ray Kurzweil–affiliated Singularity University. And Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle software, has vowed to defeat mortality. As his biographer notes, Ellison sees death as “just another kind of corporate opponent he can outfox.” But in this case, the house always wins.
We may daydream of becoming godlike, but distressingly human we remain. Julius Caesar was deified, despite accomplishing the one thing no divinity could: he died, as did his heir Augustus, the self-designated Son of God. Subsequent emperors fantasized about making it to forever, but Tiberius was smothered, Caligula stabbed, Claudius poisoned, Commodus strangled. Killed in battle. Drowned. Struck by lightning. Their profiles were permanently sutured into coins, but they spent themselves. Starvation. Decapitation. Apoplexy. The plague. The end.
Yet, we continually long for something greater. This yearning to go beyond, to transcend our current state, is built into our DNA, because that’s precisely what DNA does. It takes on new forms of complexity. Its impetus is to overreach, to overextend, to mutate on up, and the miracle (or reality) of life is precisely that it has managed to express itself in such an infinity of shapes and sizes. There is something in life that wants to replicate variations of itself, something vital and revitalizing, something as creative as creation, something that opens a passage through inertia and pulsates into being: call it the Life Force.
* * *
“Your own fate you can’t escape,” wrote Turgenev. My fate, as that dream fountain decreed, became researching eternity.
At the outset, I had no idea what immortality even meant. I started by reading the oldest stories ever written, the newest discoveries in molecular biology, the densest philosophy, the soaringest poems, the freakiest online message boards. Nothing dealing with immortality offers any closure. Some thinkers out there have spent decades attempting to prove or disprove eternal life. Their treatises invariably conclude with lines about how the belief in personal immortality “inevitably and inescapably involves unresolved and perhaps unresolvable tensions.” Perhaps. Grappling with such books can be a thrilling speculative workout, but the mental gymnastics inevitably and inescapably drop you where you were at the start, only more confused. “He is convulsed,” wrote Byron. “This is to be a mortal and seek the things beyond mortality.” Finding certitude in the world of immortality is like trying to paint with air.
Immortality doesn’t want to be understood. It wants to be believed in. And trying to comprehend how the believing mind works often left me feeling autistic. Medieval alchemists deemed investigations into the nature of eternity to be voyages into the sylva sylvarum—the forest of forests. In no time, the topic possessed me. I lived under its canopy. The forest dictated the rules, the timetable, even some of the words. I’d find myself writing sentences that made no sense. But then, months later, I’d understand what I’d been getting at. The forest guided me.
Part of the magic of exploration is its unpredictability. False starts, painful detours, dissolving paths: mistakes are how stories, and lives, take shape. The word error derives from the Latin term errare, which has a dual meaning: to be wrong and to wander, two verbs about being human. We are built for the hunt, for losing our way, and in hopes of finding the unfindable we can only continue searching, always moving forward, never arriving, until we actually die. We’re never really out of the forest.
* * *
As I familiarized myself with the literature, I started speaking with geneticists and gerontologists about the tumult surrounding scientific promises of indefinite life extension, with classicists and mythologists about the fountain of youth in history, with balneologists and homeopaths about the powers of healing waters, with mystagogues about the meaning of rebirth and regeneration. I embarked on countless concentric conversations plumbing their, and my, innermost values. The leaders of different religious denominations told me about immortality in their respective faiths. Quacks demonstrated their products, and philosophers of science shared their insights.
I wholeheartedly loved learning about never-ending life, but the subject often felt so endless that I despaired of ever completing a manuscript. I hung a poster of a skull over my desk and tried to keep calm and carry on. I joined a yoga studio, bought bottles of burgundy (wine being a means of realizing mysteries), and attempted to understand the ways we can’t understand.
I had entered the dark woods. Groping my way out took five years. That’s normal. Descending into the underworld isn’t complicated, as the Cumaean Sibyl informs Aeneas: “But to return, and view the cheerful skies, / In this the task and mighty labor lies.” I chipped away at a never-ending book. I grew older. I broke some bones. I took up whittling. I always only saw infinity. Whether or not I believed in free will, I couldn’t not continue. Life’s inextinguishable current had zapped me in a dream.
Throughout the process, my dreams overflowed with fountains, bodies of water, magical liquids. I dreamed that I was in Water School, that I was chewing on the ocean’s blue flesh, that I’d found the formula to explain water’s mysterious link to the symbolic realm. I dreamed that a bird made of water flew into my room and told me I could ask it one question. “Are you really here?” I asked. It didn’t respond. I dreamed I was crawling up a mountain, deliriously stopping at every puddle in case it contained the fountain of youth. On the atoll of Apollo, I dreamed I saw Dionysus with my own eyes. Sacred light shone down, filling me with awe and terror.
Waking from these dreams, I struggled to relax. There is no need to stay in the narrative, I’d remind myself. There is only this moment, unconnected to what came before, to any others, there is only now. I learned to breathe deeply.
In hopeful moments, I’d envisage the book’s unfinishedness as a stay of execution. If some chthonian dream deity had wanted this project to be undertaken, then—simply by following through—I was protected unto completion by that subterranean force majeure. In bleaker climes, however, I felt haunted for not moving fast enough, and I often thought the book would kill me if I didn’t kill it first. Such is the believing mind, or at least the writing mind. I can vouch for Margaret Atwood’s formulation; she describes writing a book as an act of “negotiating with the dead.”
One afternoon in my studio, surrounded by heaps of paper, on the verge of giving up entirely, I got a call from an unfamiliar number.
“Infinity of Manhattan,” said the voice on the other end of the line.
I assumed it was a friend messing with me, or maybe a telemarketing scam. “Okay. Infinity? What is that?”
“We’re returning your call,” the man explained. He sounded serious.
“Excuse me?”
“You left us a message. Your inquiries weren’t totally clear, so I’m calling back.”
“I made some inquiries to Infinity?” I asked incredulously.
“Yes, you did, or maybe someone else did and they’re using your number. You wanted to know about long-distance endurance?”
If this was a prank, it was pretty cosmic in nature.
“It can’t have been me,” I stammered. “I didn’t realize I could call Infinity.”
“This must be a wrong number—we’ll take note of it. Sorry for the confusion.”
Googling the number on my call display, I learned that it was a car dealership, for the luxury-vehicle brand Infiniti (“Accelerating the Future”). Regardless, the message sank in. Long-distance endurance. Perseverance. I pressed onward.
* * *
An ancient tale about Alexander the Great describes his encounter with a wise old man in the Land of Darkness. The sage asks Alexander why he wants to venture further into the uncertainty. “I have heard that therein is the Fountain of Life,” replies Alexander, “and I desire greatly to go forth and see if, of a truth, it is there.”
Humans are alphestes, Homer wrote; searchers. Searching for immortality is an age-old impulse; that doesn’t mean it can be found. Still, an impossible quest is a good quest. “Sometimes it doesn’t help to know what it is you are really hunting,” explains the shaman Martín Prechtel, “because the beauty that the hunter becomes and creates through his willingness to fail in pursuit of what he deeply longs for and doesn’t yet understand can cause the incomprehensible thing to show its divine face.”
The cuneiform tablets of Nineveh, among the earliest written documents, tell of King Gilgamesh, whose best friend dies. He is stricken with grief. But he is the omnipotent king of Uruk, the one who has gazed into the depths—the one who slayed the Bull of Heaven!—surely he’s almighty enough to bring dead loved ones back to life. Mute with sorrow and pride, he buries his friend beneath a river and sets out to find eternal life. The scorpion people, whose knowledge is fathomless and whose glance is death, warn him about dangers ahead. A lady of the vines tries to console him, telling him that love is the closest mortals can come to immortality. Crossing the Waters of Death, he discovers a marvelous underwater plant that contains the secret of perpetual youth—the watercress of immortality, as the clay etchings call it, or the “never-grow-old”—but, alas, a serpent promptly steals it away. History’s prototypical protagonist fails, yet his story ends the only way it can: with acceptance of reality. Of mortality.
Any story about immortality is really a story about death, the greatest mystery, the stumping question, the undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveler returns. Because we can’t comprehend it, we have a need for stories about continuing—or to see death as a complete stop. Physical immortalists live a mythology in which dying is avoidable; their story isn’t far off from the story of floating up to heaven. The atheist notion that death simply means the end of the “neurons that store the informational patterns of our bodies, our memories, and our personalities” is also unverifiable. But myths don’t need to be real to be true. Stories provide something stronger than facts. They satisfy our craving for cohesion, for a thread in the maze of experience, for a beginning, middle, and end. (And possibly a sequel.)
The deaths of others bring with them a faint hope that the void will explain itself, that we’ll grasp mortality’s incomprehensibility, but surviving grief cannot reveal what, if anything, lies beyond. That will be disclosed only when we pass into something else or nothingness. The language of the dead is off-limits to the living. The only way to become fluent is to die.
Until then: life, the sea. As the waves sweep by, part of the journey from innocence to maturity, from magic to reality, entails coming to a deeper understanding of human nature, of our vulnerabilities and limitations. “Charity,” as Saint Paul put it, “believeth all.” Being charitable means being aware of others’ beliefs. It means accepting that others are like us (even if their beliefs differ). This requires seeing ourselves as one of them. Charity also involves recognizing the importance of belief in creating that most precious substance: meaning. To be human is to hunt for meaning. Death makes no sense. But imagining that we’ll live forever—whether physically or spiritually—is an elemental solace. Immortality renders death meaningful.
“The question of immortality is so urgent, so immediate, and also so ineradicable that we must make an effort to form some sort of view about it,” wrote Jung. “But how? My hypothesis is that we can do so with the aid of hints sent to us from the unconscious—in dreams, for example.” But our dreams can lead us astray. The Persian king Khosrow Anushirvan reigned from 531 to 579 CE, at which point he vanished into a mysterious fountain that he’d been told, in a dream, would unite him with the Creator. According to one account, Khosrow plunged into the water and was never seen again: “And not a trace was left behind, not a dimple on the wave.” Before his death, Khosrow had sent physicians to India in search of the secret of eternal life. All they found were stories.
Our beliefs have magical powers. They can prevent us from seeing reality; they can also allow us to accept reality, a double yellow line we’re forced to cross whenever we’re confronted with death. For the fortunate few, decades can go by without a funeral. But sooner or later, what Heidegger called a “sudden inflashing”—the realization that one day we’re going to die—forces us to contemplate our own encroaching mortality. A gaping gate opens. Losing someone is a reminder, the most potent memento mori. And the bereavement it brings has a way of reacquainting us with ourselves, with the need to believe, of making us hold on to something, anything, as we fall.
Part 1
Belief
There is only one supreme idea on earth—the idea of the immortality of the human soul.
—Dostoyevsky, Diary of a Writer
1
We Bereave, We Believe
Can I learn to suffer
Without saying something ironic or funny
On suffering? I never suspected the way of truth
Was a way of silence
—W. H. Auden, The Sea and the Mirror
We have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love death—not morbidly, but because He explains. . . . Behind the coffins and the skeletons that stay the vulgar mind lies something so immense that all that is great in us responds to it.
—E. M. Forster, Howards End
EVERYONE IN the family called her Auntie Tiny. She’d always been minuscule—“of stature elegantly wee,” as our Hungarian relatives put it. She spoke in a helium-pitched, young-girl voice, even when discussing serious matters. We kids considered her one of us. She was an emissary from the grown-up realms, a benevolent Old World pixie who kept shrinking into her dotage. We worried she’d get smaller and smaller, so teensy she’d eventually vanish.
I first heard Auntie Tiny’s real name when the funeral notice appeared:
With deep sorrow, but in acquiescence to Divine will, we inform those who knew and loved Ilona Köver Göllner that, in the 96th year of her life, she returned home to her Lord and Saviour.
Childless and widowed, our childlike Auntie Tiny had been closer to a grandmother than a great-aunt. My father’s mother died when I was very young. And the last time I tried to visit my maternal grandmother, a British antiquarian with hoarding tendencies, she asked me not to come. “I’m in an absolute muddle,” she sighed, engulfed by four stories of belongings.
Auntie Tiny loved visitors. Her one-room apartment was on the third floor of a sooty, bullet-ridden building in Budapest. She’d creak open the door, greeting my brothers and me with that witchy falsetto. Kissing her powdered cheeks felt like kissing marshmallows. “Entrez, entrez,” she’d trill. The noble bearing wasn’t affected: when she was born, the dual monarchy still reigned and her family belonged to Austria-Hungary’s landowning gentry. Following communism, all that remained was this somber tenement overlooking the Danube.
Inside it smelled of dust and paprika. Her décor was strictly Habsburg Empire: embroidered lace, illuminated vellum, ikons, dried flowers. We’d sit at a table next to the doll-size bed and eat bowls of chilled sour-cherry soup. She baked little cylindrical biscuits called pogácsa, telling us how one should never set off on a journey without a knapsack full of them.
She herself embarked on a mini-pilgrimage every morning. After lifting her hair into an onionlike beehive and lacing up her booties, she headed out to various crosses around town, beaming thoughts of eternity. Then, without fail, she attended church service.
The last time we saw each other, I’d become an adult. Her milky eyes had clouded i
nto near blindness. A vein cluster near her right iris was tangled in the distinct shape of a heart. She could no longer read her beloved books, but she seemed capable of seeing into the next world. Despite suffering more than I could imagine, she said it was all a blessing. She loved life, but was not afraid of death.
What about those who don’t know what they believe in? I wondered. As though sensing my thoughts, she gave me a small cross and said she prayed for me.
Her funeral invitation included a biblical passage: “Whoever believes in me will live, even though they die; whoever lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”
Not able to answer, but unwilling to lose her forever, I located the quote in the Gospel of John, where God is defined as love and faith as living water: “Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
* * *
We imagine ourselves impervious, but at some point in every life, grief overpowers us. When it descends, we feel physically ill. We drift asleep and fall awake with it. We catch ourselves asking unanswerables. We call that person’s name. We repeatedly anticipate being reunited and then have to re-remember reality, painfully. The depth of our reaction can come as a shock, but the slow grind of mourning work is how we accept an absence where a presence had been. Bereavement brings with it a sense of having embarked upon a lengthy search for something that can’t be found. Gnawing reminders. Wringing rearrangements. Memory folders on our mental desktop get filed away in forlorn subcompartments. Eventually, what’s gone becomes a part of us.
The Book of Immortality Page 3