The Book of Immortality Read online

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  Contents

  Epigraph

  Prologue: On Finitude and Infinity

  Introduction: The Nature of Immortality

  Part 1: Belief

  1 We Bereave, We Believe

  2 Journey into Remoteness

  3 The Valley of Astonishment

  4 Lessons of the Teachings

  5 To Sea and Hear

  6 Beneath the Gaze of Eternity

  7 Technical Interlude: Writ in Water

  8 The Magical Fountain

  9 Letters upon Letters: Dividing the Invisible

  10 Almost Real

  11 Let’s Run into the Waves and Spring Back to Life

  Part 2: Magic

  12 Mystifier

  13 Escapology

  14 The Sorcerer’s Lair

  15 Sleights of Mind

  16 Technical Interlude: Magick, Eros, Symbolism

  17 Transmuting Magic into Science

  Part 3: Science

  18 Mercurial Times

  19 Preservation’s Particulars: Longevity and Longing

  20 Biological Calculus

  21 It Was the Future

  22 Refrigerator Heaven

  23 Secret Santa Barbara

  24 The Harvard Symposium

  Conclusion: If ________ Is Possible

  Epilogue: Springs Eternal

  Acknowledgments

  Sources

  Index

  To my mother and father

  Host of the 1994 Miss USA competition, to Miss Alabama:

  “If you could live forever, would you want to, and why?”

  Miss Alabama: “I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever.”

  I haven’t any clear idea what I’m saying when I’m saying “I don’t cease to exist.” . . . If you say to me—“Do you cease to exist?”—I should be bewildered, and would not know what exactly this is to mean . . . and this is all there is to it—except further muddles.

  —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures on Religious Belief

  Prologue

  On Finitude and Infinity

  The only secret people keep

  Is Immortality.

  —Emily Dickinson, poem number 1748

  My dear colleagues: good bad, religion poetry, spirit skepticism, definition definition,

  that’s why you’re all going to die,

  and you will die, I promise you.

  The great mystery is a secret, but it’s known to a few people.

  —Tristan Tzara, Seven Dada Manifestos

  WE’RE FOREVER DREAMERS. Humans have always believed in immortality. In search of longevity, if not eternal youth, we’ve tried elixirs, hormones, prayers, pills, spells, stem cells. The Hungarian countess Erzsébet Báthory bathed in the blood of murdered virgins. Throughout the Middle Ages, old men tried to hot-wire faded energy levels with veinloads of fresh blood, often resulting in gruesome transfusion mishaps (as when three boys died draining themselves for Pope Innocent VIII). Seventeenth-century Englishmen guzzled buzzard stones and pulverized boar pizzles hoping to solve the puzzle of aging. In the 1960s, booster shots of fetal lamb cells became a trend, with Swiss tissue clinicians administering embryonic injections to the likes of Noël Coward and Somerset Maugham. Modern-day gene-regenerating creams are made with baby human foreskin fibroblasts. Some Jamaican men still grate dried tortoise scrotum into bowls of soup as an antiaging tactic. If it won’t bestow never-ending life, at the very least, they tell each other (and curious reporters), it’s like Parmesan for the erectile soul.

  Where haven’t we gone? Elderly and hopeful we’ve traveled to backwater Romania for procaine hydrochloride treatments of Gerovital-H3, to Tibet in pursuit of pure lama urine, to the South Pacific seeking rainwater cures. In the 1990s, the abundance of centenarians in the Caucasus region led to speculation that kefir extends life; but in 1998, a 121-year-old Azerbaijani divulged his secret to investigators: he never ate yogurt. We don’t care; just tell us again and again that there are hot spots, hidden valleys, and other blue zones where people live extraordinarily long, fulfilled lives. And then sell us ways of incorporating their secrets into our daily grind so that we, too, can hum forever.

  How confused can we get? Immortality is as oxymoronic and straightforward as surviving death. After all, doesn’t radical life extension just lead to eternal life? Heaven’s Gaters convinced themselves they could reach the comet of paradise through cyanide-laced applesauce. The poet Charles Baudelaire’s suicide note (from a failed 1845 attempt) explained, “I’m killing myself because I believe I am immortal.” The pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles leapt into an active volcano to prove that immortality is real. He was never seen again, but his name lives on in perpetuity. Eternal life is twisted like that, a molten knot, a Möbius striptease, a pretzel made of mirrors.

  We die to live forever; and we use immortality to keep dead people alive. Decades after their deaths, the preserved bodies of Chairman Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Lenin remain on public view. “Lenin, even now, is more alive than all the living,” declared Vladimir Mayakovsky, at the great leader’s funeral. “Lenin’s death is not death,” clarified the suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich. “He is alive and eternal.”

  How weird have we been? In our desperation, we’ve eaten Egyptian mummies. Entwined and embalmed, preserved for millennia, they seemed connected to the beyond. For hundreds of years, until World War II, scraps and powders of shredded or ground mummified corpses were prescribed as medicine (Mumia vera aegyptiaca) by European medics. Sixteenth-century physicians claimed that our vitality is nothing more than “a certain embalsamed Mumia,” a self-generated healing balm that prevents us from rotting alive. Early chemists described it as “the liquor of an interior salt most carefully and naturally preserving its body from corruption.” This corporeal potion could also be manufactured chemically, they argued, with mercury, or as a saline solution incorporating the smoked flesh of dead youths mixed with myrrh, agarwood resin, turpentine, and other distillates. Alas.

  Still, ancient Egyptians were capable of building pyramids; surely they knew a thing or two about extending lives? When the four-thousand-year-old Edwin Smith Papyrus first resurfaced, it seemed to contain ancient secrets of rejuvenation. The scroll commences with a tantalizing promise: “The beginning of the book for making an old man into a youth . . .” Once the hieratic scribbles were fully decrypted, however, the directives turned out to be a base recipe for fenugreek oil—used to mask liver spots and as a hair restorative for balding men.

  The truth is bald: we all get old and die, even if we wish there were a shampoo of eternal life. In late medieval times, experts thought the answer lay in usnea, a moss or lichen from the skull of a hanged man. Some of us still keep tufts of dead loved ones’ hair in hopes of one day cellularly regenerating them. After the poet Milton died, his grave was pillaged for mementos. His hair didn’t even need to be cut off—the follicles were no longer stuck to the scalp, and bunches came off in handfuls. These, alongside sundry other bits, made their way into collections d’élite. Poets called the locks of Milton’s hair in their possession “lovely things that conquered death.”

  Half in love with the impossible, we’ve always wanted to conquer death. In 1854, the medical specialist Léopol
d Turck published a groundbreaking work (De la Vieillesse Etudiée Comme Maladie) characterizing old age as a curable illness. He believed electrical-shock treatments could revitalize and rejuvenate the elderly and the infirm. He was wrong. Aging is a fact of life, not a disease.

  Or is it? We’re bombarded with media reports on the inevitability of living forever: all we need to do is lengthen telomeres, target sirtuins, or activate CREB1, the brain’s latest “longevity molecule.” Cover stories in the New York Times Magazine tell us there are immortal jellyfish, but then it turns out the jellyfish aren’t immortal at all. In reality, the immortal jellyfish is extremely weak, easily killed, and often eaten by slugs.

  We want immortality so badly that we’re always ready to be swept away into unthinkingness. Pitchmen claim that injecting stem cells into our skin will make us young forever, but then women who’ve undergone pioneering surgical stem-cell face-lifts discover tiny bones growing in their eyelids. (Each blink sounds “like a tiny castanet snapping shut.”) In 1971, longevity researchers declared that science would unravel all the mysteries of aging within five years. Five years later, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that “human life could be extended to 800 years.” That same year, an outfit called Microwave Instrument Co. in Del Mar, California, said they’d have immortality drugs on the market within three years. Here we are, decades later, still croaking. The expression hope springs eternal itself first appeared in a 1733 poem mocking the foolish desire to become godlike through science. That vain hope is eternally ours.

  In 1220 CE, the undefeatable Genghis Khan summoned a cave-dwelling Taoist monk called Qiu Chuji to his court. The Great Khan felt sure that Qiu Chuji had penetrated the essence of the Tao. Here, finally, was someone who knew the secret to infinity. “Communicate to me the means of preserving life,” the Khan implored in his missive. “Say only one word to me and I shall be happy.” The wise old hermit obliged, traveling thousands of miles over Mongolia and the Tian Shan mountains, across Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, into Afghanistan, finally arriving at the warlord’s encampment in the Hindu Kush. “Sainted man, you have come from a great distance,” announced Genghis Khan, welcoming him. “Have you a medicine of immortality?”

  Qiu Chuji shook his head: “There are no medicines for immortality.”

  Today, according to the market-research firm Global Industry Analysts, we spend somewhere between $80 billion and $114 billion per year on antiaging products and other modern medicines for immortality. And none of them work. All we can really do is eat our vegetables and exercise. Even then, no matter what we sacrifice, how disciplined we may be, whether we chug wheatgrass or not, we can still get stuck in a tsunami, pulled into drawn-out illness, trampled by an elephant. We all have to go the way Genghis did, whether dying in battle, tumbling off a horse, succumbing to pneumonia, or being shivved by a lover. Maybe one day we just don’t wake up. However it happens, we enter the mystery.

  Introduction

  The Nature of Immortality

  It is apparent that there is no death.

  But what does that signify?

  —Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Spring”

  Because they believed in nothing, they were ready to believe anything.

  —Lucian Boia, Forever Young

  IMMORTALITY DOESN’T ACTUALLY EXIST. It’s not something tangible we can point to, see, or demonstrate. It resides in thought but not in reality. Immortality is an abstract concept that helps us make sense of death. The idea emerged from our fear of dying, from the sense that life must go on in some way.

  Immortality means nonmortality, undeath, never-ending existence in this world or some other. It is the permanent absence of death. It entails evading or outliving the end. But that can’t be done, or at least we can’t prove that it can be done. No examples of anything immortal have ever been found by science. There are just visions, tales, hopes, fears, and maybe some inferential cognizers.

  In most definitions, immortality occurs after death. The unending perseverance of a mind or a soul following the decay of the physical body is spiritual immortality. The basic premise of this cosmology is simple: we die but our soul (or some other part) doesn’t. Just as our flesh must necessarily decay, our spirit or intellect or entelechy returns to the primordial source. An energy or force within us outlives its mortal container, ending up in the afterlife or hurled back into rebirth.

  Spiritual immortality is a narrative of numberless incarnations, from eternal sanctification to damnation to reincarnation. The very word immortality conceals infinite possibilities. It’s a one-word poem. It can mean whatever we want it to mean, whatever we believe it to mean. In recent years, the idea of the indefinite persistence of an undying material body has captivated us. But physical immortality is also a mythology. It, too, helps followers cope with an uncertain world, just as a Christian uses the idea of redemption.

  We tend to imagine that these are secular times. The facts suggest otherwise. Belief in posthumous immortality is very much alive today. Data collected by the General Social Surveys show that 80 percent of Americans believe in life after death. The figures are around 70 percent in Canada, 65 percent in Australia, 60 percent in the UK, and above 50 percent throughout much of Europe. According to the World Values Survey, close to 100 percent of those surveyed in parts of the Middle East believe in the afterlife. Not exactly a faithless world.

  For those of us who don’t believe in immortality, we can either dismiss it or contemplate it. Either way, it’s not something we can resolve. Immortality is a matter of belief, not fact. Like death, immortality is something we dance with. But there’s no denying the existence of death. We can believe we won’t die, but dying is ineluctable, devastating, real.

  Every single day around two hundred thousand people die worldwide. There are two deaths every second. Six people just died. Make that eight. Ten. It can happen to anybody at any time, and yet exposure to death profoundly bothers our mind precisely because we can’t understand it. Death is what’s called a “meaning threat.” When confronted with the incomprehensible—such as losing a loved one—our mind scrambles to find another pattern that alleviates the confusion. For some, it’s enough to say, “They’re gone.” Others have such an urgent need to escape feelings of meaninglessness that they create alternate, more coherent plausibilities, such as myths about immortality.

  Grief forces us to have an opinion about the end. Imagining that everlasting life exists is a common reaction. We tell ourselves the loved one is somewhere else now, somewhere better. To make sense of insensateness, we wrap ourselves in beliefs. We’re all apprentice magicians trying to master the trick that transforms loss into understanding.

  * * *

  Thoughts of eternal life shuttle between the terminals of knowledge and belief. There are things we can know and things we can’t know. The knowables are gathered into knowledge. We deal with everything else through belief. Science is our means of exploring all that can be known; belief is how we approach that which cannot be known. Beliefs allow the brain to assert truths when lacking material evidence. Death tells us nothing knowable, only that we are currently alive and that our bodies won’t last forever.

  As a result, psychologists claim we’re all frightened of dying, but it isn’t simply anticipatory worry; it’s the not knowing that bothers us, the lack of control. What we want is something that doesn’t exist: resolution.

  Because patternlessness cannot be borne, the brain represses thoughts of its eventual extinction. It’s impossible to understand what it would be like to have no more thoughts. We have a central incapacity, a bug built into the operating system: our consciousness cannot imagine a lack of consciousness. Trying to imagine our own death is like trying to think thought. We cannot do it. “Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness, and you will see the impossibility of it,” wrote Unamuno. “The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness. We cannot conceive ourselves as not existing.”

  N
onexistence is nonconceivable. The brain conceptualizes things as being somehow similar to other conceivable things, so we compare death to life, minus the body—which is why we imagine that our consciousness (whatever that is) will outlive us. All our fantasies of stymieing the inevitable stem from an inability to grasp the fact of finality.

  * * *

  Consider what would happen if certain species did not die. They would simply keep on breeding and accumulating. In the time it takes to read this sentence, several hundred million ants will have been born across the planet. It would take a single tiny bacterium mere hours to generate a mass equivalent to that of a human child—and there are countless billions of bacteria within a hundred-foot radius of everyone. Imagine if they could live forever? “In less than two days, the entire surface of the earth would be covered in great smelly dunes of prettily colored bacteria,” explains zoologist Lyall Watson. “Left similarly unhindered, a protozoan could achieve the same end in forty days; a house fly would need four years; a rat eight years; a clover plant eleven years; and it would take almost a century for us to be overwhelmed by elephants.” We can thank death for the fact that our atmosphere isn’t clogged with hedgehogs all the way to the ozone layer. Like everything else in nature, we’re all terminal cases.

  The oldest person who ever lived whose true age could officially be verified died at 122 in 1997. (She only gave up smoking at 119.) From the dawn of the Homo genus up to the 1800s, the majority could expect to live for approximately twenty-five to forty years. Largely due to basic realizations about hygiene, life expectancy has increased significantly over the past century and a half. Some demographers argue that life spans have attained their utmost and are starting to decrease slightly. Others disagree, suggesting that 125 is a reasonable target for baby boomers. Most scientists maintain that human life has a maximum expiry date, but immortalists speak of Plastic Omega (omega being the end of life, and plastic being malleable). As of 2013, all parties can anticipate living somewhere between seventy to ninety years unless an accident, disease, or disaster strikes—or immortality becomes reality.