Immortality (36 page)

Borges’s hypothesis is that, given an infinite amount of time, any event with a finite probability would happen. You would inevitably one day be a TV chef, at another time prime minister of Belgium and at some point a stripper in a go-go bar. And possibly all these things
many times over. And as all things would happen to all of us, there would be nothing to distinguish us one from another: “No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men,” Borges writes. After we had many times been both victim and perpetrator, monarch and subject, we would cease to regard anything as better or worse than anything else; meaning would collapse. Faced with infinity, life would become a joke—and we would already know the punch line.

The most ardent immortal might see a way around these problems: our memories are not perfect, they could argue; perhaps, by the time we have seen all the interesting places there are to see and tried all the delicious dishes or studied all the subjects under the sun we will have forgotten what the first most interesting place was like, or how caviar tastes, or the finer points of quantum physics, and so will be able to begin the whole journey once again. In other words, with the proper pacing of our pleasures—whether over months or millennia—we could ensure they always seemed fresh.

Perhaps this is so; there is nothing logically incoherent in the idea of a temporal wheel of happiness, involving continuous discovering, forgetting and rediscovering. But such an elaborate cycle of delightful experiences is unlikely to be the reality for billions of immortals on an overcrowded planet, should we tomorrow find the elixir of life. Nor is it the vision of the afterlife promised by most religions (recall the book of Revelation’s description of heaven as a place whose inhabitants “are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night”). In the end, the problem of boredom might be one of personality: there might be those whose natural joie de vivre carries them through eternity, while the rest of us grow weary of the world and—most of all—ourselves.

B
UT
even more troubling for the immortal than the problem of having so much time behind them is how much time they would still have ahead of them. The constraint of finite time shapes our every decision. It is what drives us to get out of bed in the morning, to
finish studying and get into the world, to earn money for a decent retirement. The dread that, on our deathbed, we might look back on a wasted life propels us to realize our dreams. The clock that steals a second of our lives with every tick reminds us that the time to act is now. In other words: death is the source of all our deadlines.

What happens if we find an elixir and this deadline disappears? For a start, those who leave everything to the last minute would be in trouble—as there would never be one. Procrastination could be taken to a whole new level. If it looked to be a rainy millennium, you could spend the thousand years in bed. If your time were infinite, it would no longer make sense to talk of it being wasted: life as we know it may be too short to watch daytime TV, but eternity wouldn’t be.

The deep problem is this: the value of a thing is related to its scarcity—people conscious of their mortality value their time and aim to spend it wisely because they know their days are numbered. But if our days were not numbered, this incentive would disappear: given infinity, time would lose its worth. And once time is worthless, it becomes impossible to make rational decisions about how to spend it. The consequences of this for an individual would be bad enough; for a civilization of such ditherers it would be disastrous.

If this speculation about infinite time sounds a little abstract, we can look at the experience of those who suddenly realize their time is very finite. People who narrowly escape death frequently experience a realization of the shortness of life and at the same time a newfound joy in its preciousness. The psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom, who works with the terminally ill, has noted that even those diagnosed with diseases such as cancer experience an “enhanced sense of living … a vivid appreciation of the elemental facts of life … and deeper communication with loved ones.” So evidence suggests that life is already so long that we fail to appreciate it—more time, or indeed infinite time, could only exacerbate this.

Many philosophers have argued that only death makes our deeds count. It gives urgency to our choices and makes the outcomes matter. It is by choosing to sacrifice some of our precious, limited time—or even our lives—in the service of others that we demonstrate virtue. These skeptics point to the stories of the Greek gods as a case study: freed from the bonds of mortality, they are fickle and frivolous. They are spectators on a world in which only the mortals can demonstrate heroism or decency.

The existentialists say we are defined by the choices we make, such as whether to collaborate with the invaders or risk our lives fighting for
la résistance
. But these choices are only meaningful because life is short. If I have a mere seventy years before me, it is a crucial question whether I spend them in a decadent jamboree or building hospitals for the poor, but with infinite time I can—and if Borges is right, will—do all these things many times over. Our choices become meaningless, and there is nothing left to define us as moral beings.

What is particularly interesting about this problem—the problem of an infinite future—is that it does not affect all immortality narratives equally. If, for example, one of Linus Pauling’s successors formulates a medical elixir that could stave off aging indefinitely, they would not thereby make us immune to death in all its forms. So-called medical immortals could always hope to live to the next year or decade or century, yet the Reaper’s scythe would still be hovering. Given all the things that could go wrong, from a piano falling on their head to the heat death of the universe, the medical immortals would not therefore be faced with a truly infinite future. They might have a challenging time planning their lives, not knowing if those lives would last fifty years or fifty thousand, but it would not be impossible.

The situation of what we might call a “true immortal” who cannot die would be quite different. As we saw in
chapter 6
, such a person really would be confronted with billions and billions of
years—and that just for starters—then billions and billions more, extending into an unending future. This would be the lot of all of us if we have (or more properly
are
) immortal and indestructible souls, as Plato and plenty since have argued. For a person with such a soul, nonexistence is not an option, and the aimlessness of unceasing eons beckons.

T
OGETHER
, these two problems suggest it would be disastrous for a civilization if its members really were to achieve personal immortality. In Borges’s story, the immortals begin by building their dream city, but as tedium and aimlessness set in, they make their city ever more absurd, until it is a nonsensical labyrinth of dead ends and staircases leading nowhere. Finally they abandon it altogether to live like troglodytes in the desert. This is a fitting allegory: in a society where time has no value and everything worth doing has been done, there remains only ever-more-pointless and destructive play. If civilization exists to aid our perpetuation into the future, then if that perpetuation were guaranteed, civilization would be redundant. A meaningful life and a productive society require limitations that define them. We need finitude.

“M
ANY
people find that their belief in immortality is strongest when they think least about it,” wrote the American philosopher J. B. Pratt in 1920. After one thinks about these beliefs a great deal, it is clear why. Our predicament now is this: we yearn to live forever, but if we did it would be awful. We need finitude to give life value, yet that finitude comes packaged with the fear of death. Civilization exists to give us immortality, but if it ever succeeded it would fall apart. Given these contradictions, the immortality narratives seem to have found the right solution: promise eternity but don’t deliver.

But once you have seen their many flaws, it is difficult again to find solace in their assurances. We of course are not the first to find ourselves in this position: for as long as there has been civilization, there have been doubters, those who have seen through the dominant narrative of their day and remained unpersuaded by the alternatives. And among those doubters were those not willing to accept that living without the illusion of immortality meant living with the constant fear of death. They therefore looked deeper into the human condition, to attack the very roots of the fear of death and the will to immortality. We owe the origins of the Wisdom Narrative to such rebellious and profound thinkers—thinkers like Shiduri, the barmaid at the end of the world.

When Gilgamesh met the barmaid he was gripped by existential angst. “I am afraid of death,” he lamented, “so I wander the wild.” The death of his friend Enkidu had made his own mortality real to him—which is of course just the realization that forms the first part of the Mortality Paradox. This realization constitutes
knowledge
—of the reality of death—but not yet wisdom. Just as we have seen many times in our study, Gilgamesh reacted to this knowledge by pursuing the immortality narratives—indeed, to varying degrees all four, though by the time he reached the inn at the end of the world his focus was on the most primal: Staying Alive. As we have seen, he failed in his quest—but the story does not quite end there.

Having exhausted the four paths and accepted his mortality, Gilgamesh returned to take his proper place as king. In the poem’s brief climax, he marvels at the beauty and strength of his city—its walls, temples and date groves. According to Sumerian legend, he then went on to bring many decades of peace and prosperity to his people. He was hailed as the one who looked into “the deep” and “saw what was secret.” This “secret” was revealed by the barmaid: that the immortality narratives were nonsense—eternal life the gods kept for themselves, and we should therefore learn to value
what life we have: “enjoy yourself always by night and by day.” This was “of everything the sum of wisdom.”

Wisdom, therefore, meant finding a way to accept and live with mortality. This was not the only narrative to be found in Sumerian-Babylonian culture—other texts, for example, have lively portrayals of the afterlife, some even with Gilgamesh as its ruler. But it was a persistent one, diligently copied out by generations of scribes for two and a half thousand years (until the arrival of Alexander the Great absorbed this region into the Greco-Roman world). And it was an influential one: a tradition of what has come to be known as “wisdom literature” spread throughout the Near East and Mediterranean. One example of this literature is still read by millions of people around the world, for it is in the heart of the Hebrew Bible and Christian Old Testament.

Of course, as we have seen, the Bible contains powerful immortality narratives, including the Resurrection Narrative that emerges toward the end of the Old Testament and dominates the New Testament, and the hints at a Soul Narrative that have subsequently come to be so influential in the Christian tradition. But the Bible has many threads with many authors—and some of them sympathized instead with the barmaid’s seditious alternative. These authors wrote those books of the Bible that explicitly concern themselves with the meaning of wisdom. They are usually grouped together in the middle of the Old Testament, even though possibly written at very different times, and include at least Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs. In places, the parallels between these works and the message—even the wording—of the Gilgamesh epic are astonishing.

Ecclesiastes, for example, begins with a fine expression of the recognition of the fact of death: “For the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other” (3:19). The author goes on to make clear that neither glorious afterlife nor legacy awaits: “The dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and
even the memory of them is lost” (9:5). And what conclusion does the author draw for what we mortals should then do? “Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart … Let thy garments be always white; and let thy head lack no ointment. Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity” (9:7–9). This is the barmaid’s speech almost verbatim.

Psalm 90 puts the central message even more pithily: after acknowledging that our fate is to “turn back to dust,” the psalmist urges, “So teach us to number our days”—that is, to realize they are limited and so appreciate their worth—“that we may get a heart of wisdom.” Such writing came in different forms with different points of emphasis, but throughout, as the historian of religion Alan Segal succinctly put it, “wisdom and mortality are unconditionally wed.”

Nowhere did the Wisdom Narrative come to eclipse all immortality narratives. But throughout this region, the cradle of civilization, its presence can be found—even in Egypt, with its fabulously sophisticated immortality system interweaving all four narratives. One text found inscribed in the tomb of a King Intef of Thebes dating back to around 2000
BCE
asks: What has become of those who built the great pyramids? The walls of their tombs are now crumbling, and “none returns from there to tell their conditions, to tell of their state, to reassure us … [So] follow your heart and happiness! Make your things on earth!”

I
N
these early civilizations, this alternative narrative never got beyond exhortations along the “make merry while you can” lines. This is the kernel of the narrative but by no means its full extent. As usual, it took the arrival of the Greeks to turn insight and intuition into rigorous philosophy. “Philosophy” of course means “love of wisdom,” and Greek philosophy followed in the wisdom-literature tradition of its Mediterranean neighbors by concerning itself primarily with the question of how to live—and in particular, how to live given the fact of death. Some philosophers, like Plato, developed
immortality narratives. But others followed the barmaid—such as the Epicureans and the Stoics, two schools that developed in the third century
BCE
. Despite their differences, both of these schools taught that the fear of death could be conquered without resorting to illusions of everlasting life.