The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead (16 page)

How to Live Forever (ii)

There are now thousands of people worldwide in the “longevity movement” who believe it's possible to live for hundreds of years, perhaps forever. Very nearly everyone in the longevity movement is male (my father often has some of their literature lying around). Because they give birth, women seem to feel far less craving for personal immortality.

Ray Kurzweil, who has won a National Medal of Technology award, been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, is the author of
Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever,
and has been working on the problem of artificial intelligence since he was a teenager in the '60s, believes that human immortality is no more than 20 years away. (Even my father acknowledges he's probably not going to be around for that event.) To make sure he lives long enough in order to be around, first, for the biotech revolution, when we'll be able to control how our genes express themselves and ultimately change the genes; and, second, for nanotechnology and the artificial-intelligence revolution, Kurzweil takes 250 supplements a day, drinks 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea a day, and periodically tracks 40 to 50 fitness indicators, including “tactile sensitivity.” Kurzweil makes my dad seem like—as he would say—“a piker.”

Millions of robots—“nanobots” the size of blood cells—will keep people forever young by swarming through the body, repairing bones, muscles, arteries, and brain cells. These nanobots will work like repaving crews in our bloodstreams and brains, destroying diseases, rebuilding organs, and obliterating known limits on the human intellect. Improvements to genetic coding will be downloaded from the internet. You won't need a heart.

Kurzweil says, “No more than a hundred genes are involved in the aging process. By manipulating these genes, radical life extension has already been achieved in simpler animals. We are not another animal, subject to nature's whim. Biological evolution passed the baton of progress to human cultural and technological development.” He also says that all 30,000 of our genes “are little software programs.” We'll be able to block disease-causing genes and introduce new ones that would slow or stop the aging process.

“Life is chemistry,” says Brian Wowk, a physicist with 21st Century Medicine. “When the chemistry of life is preserved, so is life.”

Aubrey de Grey, a geneticist at the University of Cambridge, says, “In principle, a copy of a living person's brain—all trillion cells of it—could be constructed from scratch, purely by
in vitro
manipulation of neurons into a synaptic network previously scanned from that brain.”

João Pedro de Magalhães, a research fellow in genetics at Harvard Medical School, says, “Aging is a sexually transmitted disease that can be defined as a number of time-dependent changes in the body that lead to discomfort, pain, and eventually death. Maybe our grandchildren will be born without aging.”

Robert Freitas Jr., a senior research fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, says, “Using annual checkups and cleanouts, and some occasional major repairs, your biological age could be restored once a year to the more or less constant physiological age that you select. I see little reason not to go for optimal youth, though trying to maintain your body at the ideal physiological age of ten years old might be difficult and undesirable for other reasons. A rollback to the robust physiology of your late teens or early twenties would be easier to maintain and much more fun.” Tee-hee. “That would push your expected age of death up to around 700 to 900 calendar years. You might still eventually die of accidental causes, but you'll live ten times longer than we do now.

“How far can we go with this? If we can eliminate 99 percent of all medically preventable conditions that lead to natural death, your healthy life span, or health span, should increase to about 1,100 years. It may be that you'll find it hard to coax more than a millennium or two out of your original biological body, because deaths from suicides and accidents have remained stubbornly high for the last 100 years, falling by only one third during that time. But our final victory over the scourge of natural death, which we shall achieve later in this century, should extend the health spans of normal human beings by at least tenfold beyond its current maximum length.”

Would life get intolerably boring if you lived for a couple of millennia? In the first century
B.C.
, Pliny the Elder, the Roman encyclopedist, wrote of people in previous times who, exhausted by life at age 800, leaped into the sea.

My father now, at 97, seems bored beyond belief—virtually without a single interest or enthusiasm other than continued existence, day after day after day. In
The Body in Pain,
Elaine Scarry says, “As the body breaks down, it becomes increasingly the object of attention, usurping the place of all other objects, so that finally, in very, very old and sick people, the world may exist only in a circle two feet out from themselves; the exclusive content of perception and speech may become what was eaten, the problems of excreting, the progress of pains, the comfort or discomfort of a particular chair or bed.” This is what is suddenly happening to my dad, who until the past few months had still been exercising as if in preparation for a geezers' Ironman competition.

Marc Geddes, a New Zealand writer on artificial intelligence and mathematics, suggests the possibility of “brain refresher drugs,” which will prevent “brains from becoming too inflexible. The people living in the far future might be able to alter their bodies and personalities as easily as the people of today change their clothes. The fact that some people living today get tired of life is more likely to be a practical, biological problem than a philosophical one.”

Sherwin Nuland, the author of
How We Die,
says about Kurzweil and his fellow fantasists, “They've forgotten that they're acting on the basic biological fear of death and extinction, and it distorts their rational approach to the human condition.”

Exhibit A: Leonard Hayflick, professor of anatomy at University of California–San Francisco, a couple of whose public lectures my father has attended, explains that every chromosome has tails at its end that get shorter as a cell divides. Over time, these tails, called telomeres, become so short that their function is disrupted, and this, in turn, leads the cell to stop proliferating. Average telomere length, therefore, gives some indication of how many divisions the cell has already undergone and how many remain before it can no longer replicate. I.e., there's an intrinsic limit to how long humans can live.

In Tennyson's
Tithonus,
the eponymous protagonist, who is granted his wish of immortality without realizing he'd be aging forever, decides he wants to die:

…Let me go: take back thy gift.

Why should a man desire in any way

To vary from the kindly race of men,

Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance

Where all should pause, as is most meet for all?

Release me, and restore me to the ground.

My father doesn't see it like that. Good for him.

Last Words

Leonard Bernstein said, “What's this?”

Babe Ruth said, “I'm going over the valley.”

Cotton Mather said, “Is this all? Is this what I feared when I prayed against a hard death? Oh, I can bear this. I can bear it!”

The Greek philosopher Anaxarchus, pounded to death with pestles in the fourth century
B.C.
, said, “Pound, pound the pouch containing Anaxarchus. You pound not Anaxarchus.”

Air Force Major Norman Basell, flying bandleader Glenn Miller to France on a flight that vanished over the English Channel, said, “What's the matter, Miller—do you want to live forever?”

The philologist Barthold George Niebuhr, noticing that his medicine was intended only for terminal cases, asked, “What essential substance is this? Am I so far gone?”

Angelica Kauffmann, an eighteenth-century artist, stopped her cousin—who had begun to read her a hymn for the dying—and said, “No, Johann, I will not hear that. Read me the ‘Hymn for the Sick' on page 128.”

William H. Vanderbilt, president of the New York Central Railroad, said, in 1885, “I have no real gratification or enjoyment of any sort more than my neighbor down the block who is worth only half a million.”

Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, said, “I am tired of ruling over slaves.”

Louise, Queen of Prussia, said, “I am a queen, but I have no power to move my arms.”

Queen Elizabeth I said, “All my possessions for one moment of time.”

Phillip III, king of Spain, said, “Oh would to God I had never reigned. Oh that those years in my kingdom I had lived a solitary life in the wilderness. Oh that I had lived alone with God. How much more secure should I have died. With how much more confidence should I have gone to the throne of God. What doth all my glory profit but that I have so much the more torment in my death?”

Cardinal Henry Beaufort said, “Will not all my riches save me? What, is there no bribing death?”

Henry James said, “So here it is at last, the distinguished thing.”

Anne Boleyn said, “The executioner is, I believe, an expert, and my neck is very slender.”

Marie Antoinette, tripping over her executioner's foot, said, “Monsieur, I beg your pardon. I did not do it on purpose.”

Charles II said, “I have been a most unconscionable time dying, but I beg you to excuse it.”

Sir William Davenant, seventeenth-century British Poet Laureate, unable to complete a final poem, said, “I shall have to ask leave to desist, when I am interrupted by so great an experiment as dying.”

Rabelais said, “I am going in search of a great perhaps.”

James Thurber said, “God bless. God damn.”

H. G. Wells said, “God damn you all; I told you so.”

Francis Buckland, an inspector of fisheries, said, “God is so good to the little fishes, I do not believe He would let their inspector suffer shipwreck at last.”

Eugène Ysaÿe, a Belgian violinist and composer, said, after his Fourth Sonata was played for him, “Splendid. The finale just a little too fast.”

James Quin, an eighteenth-century British actor, said, “I could wish this tragic scene were over, but I hope to go through it with becoming modesty.”

Replying to the observation that dying must be very hard, the actor Edmund Gwenn said, “It is. But not as hard as farce.”

Flo Ziegfeld said, “Curtain! Fast music! Light! Ready for the finale! Great! The show looks good! The show looks good!”

James Croll, a lifelong teetotaler, said, “I'll take a wee drop of that. I don't think there's much fear of me learning to drink now.”

The eighteenth-century sociologist Auguste Comte said, “What an irreparable loss!”

Da Vinci said, “I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.”

The British newspaper tycoon Lord Beaverbrook said, “This is my final word. It is time for me to become an apprentice once more. I have not settled in which direction.”

Machiavelli said, “I desire to go to hell and not heaven. In the former place I shall enjoy the company of popes, kings, and princes, while in the latter are only beggars, monks, and apostles.”

Looking at a lamp that flared at his bedside, Voltaire said, “The flames already?”

Kansas City Chiefs running back Stone Johnson, killed in a football game, said, “Oh my God, oh my God! Where's my head? Where's my head?”

The American Civil War commander General John Sedgwick, who was killed at the battle of Spotsylvania in 1864, looked over a parapet at the Confederate troops and said, “They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist—”

Vicomte de Turenne, a French soldier killed at the battle of Sasbach in 1675, said, “I did not mean to be killed today.”

Initially, the rope broke when the Russian revolutionary Bestoujeff was hanged; “Nothing succeeds with me,” he said. “Even here I meet with disappointment.”

Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor, said, “Let my epitaph be, ‘Here lies Joseph, who was unsuccessful in all his undertakings.'”

Nicholas Boileau, a French critic, responding to a playwright who asked Boileau to read his new play, said, “Do you wish to hasten my last hour?”

Oscar Wilde, dying in a tacky Paris hotel, said, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.”

Charles d'Evereruard, a gourmet, was asked by his confessor if he would be reconciled with Christ; d'Evereruard replied, “With all my heart I would fain be reconciled with my stomach, which no longer performs its usual functions.”

Frédéric Moyse, guillotined for killing his own son, said, “What, would you execute the father of a family?”

Longfellow said to his sister, “Now I know I must be very ill, since you have been sent for.”

George Fordyce, a physician, told his daughter, who had been reading to him, “Stop. Go out of the room. I am about to die.”

Baron Georges Cuvier, a zoologist, said to his daughter, who was drinking a glass of lemonade he had refused, “It is delightful to see those whom I love still able to swallow.”

O. O. McIntyre, an American newspaper columnist, said to his wife, “Snooks, will you please turn this way? I like to look at your face.”

Lady Astor, the first woman member of British Parliament, surrounded by her entire family on her deathbed, said, “Am I dying, or is this my birthday?”

Goethe said, “More light.”

The Indian chief Crowfoot said, “A little while and I will be gone from you. Whither I cannot tell. From nowhere we come, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”

Buddha said, “Decay is inherent in all things.”

Gertrude Stein asked Alice B. Toklas, “What is the answer?” When Toklas didn't respond, Stein laughed and said, “In that case, what is the question?”

After finishing a poem on New Year's Eve about New Year's Day, Johann Georg Jacobi said, “I shall not in fact see the New Year which I have just commemorated.”

Andrew Bradford, the publisher of Philadelphia's first newspaper, said, “Oh Lord, forgive the errata!”

Dominique Bouhours, a seventeenth-century French Jesuit who was the leading grammarian of his day, said, “I am about to—or I am going to—die; either expression is used.”

Replying to a question about whether he was in pain, Henry Prince of Wales, son of James I, said, “I would say ‘somewhat,' but I cannot utter it.”

Karl Marx, asked by his housekeeper if he had a last message for the world, said, “Go on, get out. Last words are for fools who haven't said enough.”

Pancho Villa said, “Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”

“In the event of my death,” my mother's will said, “I would like to have my body cremated and the ashes disposed of in the simplest way possible. My first choice would have been to donate my heart, kidneys, and cornea for transplants. However, it is not possible to donate the organs of someone with cancer. I realize that cremation is not in accordance with Jewish law, but I think it is the most sensible method of disposing of a lifeless body. Although I do not want a religious memorial service, I hope it is helpful to family and friends to have an informal gathering of people, so that each may draw strength from one another. I leave this world without regrets or bitterness of any kind. I have had a good life. May the future be kind to each of you. Shalom.” Her equanimity in the face of mortality.

What will be my father's last words?

What will be mine?