The Book of Immortality Read online

  Intriguing, genuine discoveries are being made in the field of gerontological studies. Scientists have dramatically increased the life spans of simple organisms such as yeast, roundworms, fruit flies, even mice. So far, those breakthroughs haven’t yielded human applications. But even if we learned to cure every major disease, to resolve every cause listed on death certificates, some biologists argue, we’d still only add ten or fifteen years to human life expectancy. Research being made on a genetic level could eventually prove beneficial to our health span. Even so, death will become us.

  There’s an important distinction between medicine and miracle work: miracles prevent death; medicine counteracts illness. The main aim of mainstream medicine is prolonging health, and contemporary doctors know more about keeping people alive than ever before. That doesn’t mean we can make people stop dying. The average Westerner only gets eighty years, not eighty trillion. And there’s a price to pay for extended life: the degenerative diseases of senescence. Our bodies aren’t supposed to live forever, which is why they have built-in obsolescence mechanisms.

  Longevity is starkly different from immortality, yet somehow the two have fused in public consciousness. Most of us will live longer than our ancestors did, but all of us can still die at any moment. Spurred on by our gains in life expectancy, a pandemic of magical thinking about science’s unlimited capabilities has led to a wider discussion about the possibility of eternal life.

  Prime-time TV specials with titles like “Can We Live Forever?” fuel the mass delusion. Every year more conferences pop up purporting to reveal the latest means of attaining eternity through technology. “Immortality Only 20 Years Away,” blare newspaper headlines. Philanthropic organizations (the Immortality Institute, the Methuselah Foundation, the Fuck Death Foundation) are joining together to eliminate death. “There are people living today who may extend their life spans indefinitely,” declare salesmen, triangulating faith, biology, and magic into a unified worldview.

  This confusion has led to an alarming increase in the availability of untested antiaging remedies over the past two decades. Countless products are presently being sold as having life-extending qualities, even though there aren’t any demonstrable means of increasing human life. “No treatments have been proven to slow or reverse the aging process,” announced the National Institute on Aging in 2009, trying to staunch the hype. Contrasting the claims made by life-extension companies with the genuine science of aging, fifty-two scientists signed a “Position Statement” on longevity that clarified the situation explicitly: no currently marketed intervention—none—has yet been able to stop or even affect human aging. “The prospect of humans living forever is as unlikely today as it has always been,” they wrote, “and discussions of such an impossible scenario have no place in a scientific discourse.”

  * * *

  The dominant mythology of triumphalist scientism is the idea of progress. For the most part, we don’t question the idea that everything is constantly getting better and better and better. It’s just the way things are, we tell ourselves. We’re so close to perfection. And progress necessarily leads somewhere: to a world in which we’re all immortal.

  A solid belief system is one we don’t realize is a belief system. Because science’s veritable achievements are so impressive, almost everybody today believes in the unidirectional march of progress. Technology is unceasingly propelling us forward, and science has become synonymous with progress, so it becomes easy to imagine that life everlasting is around the corner. We take it for granted that suffering can be eliminated, that poverty will ultimately be eradicated, that we should never be sick again, that science will soon make everybody never die. The illusion of continual betterment is a pervasive enough mythology that it can overlook the environmental crises, the scale of warfare, and the fact that over a billion people live on less than $1 per day.

  Is progress even real? Microchips certainly get smaller and processing speeds faster, but not everything has progressed over the past centuries. Have our emotions changed since Shakespeare’s time? Since Sophocles’s time? Are we moving toward a time of universal happiness? Genocide is not an anachronism. Neither is inequality. Is progress a law of history, or is it a story we tell ourselves?

  In 1869, the avant-garde writer Comte de Lautréamont published Les Chants de Maldoror, a book exploring “the spiritual crisis brought on by scientific progress.” In it, he characterized immortality as “the terrifying problem that humanity has not yet solved.” A century and a half later, we’re still nowhere close to solving it.

  Although our congenital belief in progress means we’re more ready than ever before to believe in physical immortality, misinformed life-extension stories have been around for millennia. There’s nothing new about bearded hustlers such as Aubrey de Grey vowing to help us live forever and cryonicists who claim to have “cured death itself.” They’re all tapping into a longing that has always been with us.

  Yellowing medical journals are filled with stories about how “the great alchemical dream, the ‘Elixir of Life,’ seems almost ready to be bottled.” Following World War II, the personal goal of attaining immortality moved from religious aspiration to “actual possibility.” In 1966, biophysicists at the California Institute of Technology wrote, “We know of no intrinsic limits to the life span.” In the 1970s, a group of molecular biologists and gerontologists mobilized as “the Immortalist Underground.” In 2010, a special issue of Time magazine about longevity announced that “elixirs of youth sound fanciful, but the first crude anti-aging drugs may not be so far away.”

  We’re drowning in misinformation. How-to books such as Why Die? A Beginner’s Guide to Living Forever and Young Again! How to Reverse the Aging Process and Physical Immortality: The Science of Everlasting Life each outline various ways to defeat reality by harnessing miracles of technology. Finding such miracles is abundantly easy, especially online. Searching “immortality device wanted” leads to a site called www.achieveimmortality.com that claims to own US patent number 5,989,178 for “the most imporatnt [sic] invention in human history,” a gear-based magnetic pinkie ring that “ALLOWS HUMANS TO STAY PHYSICALLY YOUNG FOREVER.”

  Entire subcultures of enthusiasts are dedicated to deathlessness. There are bloggers with “a passion to create an environment where all sickness, aging and death are eliminated.” There are amateur philosophers who argue that everyone is bodily immortal until proven otherwise. Facebook Transhumanists list their religious views as “the abolition of suffering.” They end posts with the movement’s abbreviation: H+, as in “human plus.” Superlongevist manifestos confidently assert that we can all live for hundreds of years, that the “eventuality” of a “modern Fountain of Youth” is nigh.

  * * *

  It is utterly ordinary to not want to die. But, as Dame Edith Sitwell once wrote, ordinariness carried to a high degree of perfection is precisely the definition of eccentricity. In her view, eccentricity entails “some rigid, and even splendid, attitude of Death, some exaggeration of the attitudes common to Life.” As she concluded, there’s something askew about people who don’t understand they will die—or that they are actually dead, in the case of cryonicists buried upside down in frozen thermoses, five per container, wrapped in sleeping bags, awaiting reanimation.

  Eccentrics really, really don’t want to die. Caloric restrictors, sun gazers, nightwalkers, potion peddlers, cybernetic Nostradamus-types, and outright charlatans: the immortality community boasts a plethora of unorthodox individuals. Most noneccentrics consider physical immortality a nonsensical fantasy, but physical immortalists don’t care. They’re convinced that science will soon unlock the codes that regulate aging. In their hunger to live forever, or at least to confirm their bias that science can solve all problems, they’re so willing to put their critical faculties on hold.

  I am not personally interested in living forever, but I am interested in writing about people obsessed with the impossible. Nonfiction writers are characterists�
�we look for characters living real stories. Perhaps not unexpectedly, people who want to never die may appear unsavory: a hint of the corpse hangs about them, a whiff of swamp yawn. Those seeking endless physical existence are undoubtedly peculiar, but there’s also something profoundly human about them. More than human, they would say. Human after all might be more accurate.

  We all believe. A belief is a relationship, something we fall into or grow up with; we can cherish it, desert it, stay loyal or cheat. A peculiarity of all belief systems is that those in the throes of belief do not see themselves as believers, but rather as those who know the Truth—even though the Truth cannot be known. We can view ourselves as believers or as nonbelievers. It’s a personal choice. Either way, we all don’t understand death. So whatever anyone sees death as is what it is.

  Building palisades of belief is what we do when we can’t understand something that has no provable explanation. When it is impossible to know something with any certitude, we turn to belief to feel like we know. Beliefs are mirages that provide the illusion of certainty. Unlike a fact, a belief can persist even when disproved.

  To this day, belief precedes knowledge. Before we can know whether something is true or not, first we have to perceive or experience it, and then believe or disbelieve it. All scientific tests begin as beliefs before becoming testable hypotheses—but once we come up against the limits of the knowable, we either turn back to rational ground or take a leap into faith.

  Examining our own base assumptions invariably means realizing that some things we take as knowable facts are simply beliefs. We may find it hard to distinguish between what we believe and what we know. We’ve classified ourselves as the species that knows: sapiens. But there is so much we don’t know, that we can’t know. We believe that we know; that’s all. Homo credulis would be more accurate.

  We all believe, and we all need mythologies. As Einstein brokered it, “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” In his view, nonbelievers don’t realize how many unattainable secrets surround us. Einstein tended to be more critical toward debunkers than those of faith. “The fanatical atheists,” he wrote, “are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle.” He espoused an approach of humility, rather than one of hubris. Just as religious zealots deserve to acknowledge the truths of science, rabid unbelievers could benefit from recognizing the limitlessness of the unknown.

  We are pattern seekers. And so-called nonbelievers, like the devout of any denomination, are simply doing what humans have always done: they are looking for meaning. The conviction that disbelief is a preferable alternative to religious belief has, paradoxically, transformed atheism into a religion. It isn’t very organized, but it is a system of thought based on a relationship with the unknowable. And any story purporting to explain death is an indication of faith.

  Approximately 5 to 10 percent of Americans don’t believe in God. Somewhere between 0.7 and 2 percent of Americans define themselves as atheists. The central tenets of atheism are that humans have no soul, that God doesn’t exist, and that nothing happens after death. None of these are provable or disprovable—they’re matters of belief. Calling atheism a “belief system” is anathema to atheists, who insist that their position is one of no beliefs whatsoever. But they do believe. They believe they know what death means, just like others. And they also have key texts, prophets, myths. They attend atheist gatherings, where they can feel that sense of belonging and community others find in traditional churches, temples, or places of meditation. As with traditional believers, they insist things would improve if everyone adhered to their view.

  Merely talking about belief can be particularly emotional for those who think they “understand” that the way for the world to be perfect is to dispense with belief. This position stems from a fundamental misapprehension of what belief actually is, and is itself a means of imposing one’s own belief system on others. I tell such people that I respect all belief systems (including theirs) as long as nobody’s getting hurt. Then again, I hasten to add, I’m the sort of centrist who believes that intelligence and faith can coexist—and who also believes that conflict is never-ending. Such conversations are akin to discussing abortion rights with evangelical Christians. But just because something is difficult to talk about doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about it. Quite the opposite.

  Atheists aren’t the only nonbelievers. A large percentage of that unbelieving 5 to 10 percent identify themselves as nothing in particular. Others are agnostics, or undecided. Agnosticism was defined by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869 as a way to “neither affirm nor deny the immortality of man.” But being noncommittal does not exempt a person from the need to believe. Even those agnostics who would remove themselves from any position are nonetheless eventually forced into a belief-officiated relationship with death.

  Whether we take out billboard advertisements calling for religions to be dispensed with or whether we protest the teaching of evolution in schools, it’s as erroneous to assume scientific theories are the literal Truth as it is to imagine that a religious text contains accurate history. Both methodologies are thought games, tools that allow us to contend with a universe whose ultimate nature will always elude us.

  An ingrained certainty about eternal life helps many people function, including physical immortalists, even though thanatologists (the technical term for those who advocate an acceptance of the inevitable) think thanatophobes are delusional. Conversely, prolongevists deride “deathists” as pessimistic pushovers. “As a physician,” Carl Gustav Jung once said, “I am convinced that it is hygienic to discover in death a goal toward which one can strive; and that shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal.” But physical immortalists are convinced that human beings think too much about death rather than too little; that we have all been too accepting of death—and that such a viewpoint is self-defeating, serving to perpetuate death. Their fondest hope is to render thanatology obsolete.

  Attempts to do justice to both sides of the argument rapidly spiral into meaninglessness, which is as it should be: beliefs are illogical. Demonstrable evidence has no place in belief. Regarding death, the only certain thing is uncertainty.

  * * *

  My own inquiries into the topic of immortality began on a fog-enshrouded fall night in London. There to research the history of labyrinths, I had spent the afternoon walking Hampton Court’s seventeenth-century hedged maze. The train back to town passed a dilapidated brick brewery with a story-high sign saying TAKE COURAGE. In my hotel room, jotting down some observations about the silvery mirror I’d come across at the center of the labyrinth, I fell asleep on the couch, an overstuffed, royal-blue antique.

  Shortly before dawn, I was startled from my slumber by an unsettling, beauteous dream of the fountain at the source of all life. The liquid gushing forth resembled water mixed with mercury. Its droplets crystallized into a blindingly radiant sea of diamonds. The fountain’s location wasn’t specified, and the rest of the dream is hazy, but the image of a crescendo of water bursting into the sky stayed with me.

  Turgenev spoke of his stories beginning as visions hovering before his eyes, soliciting him. The apparitions that inspired his writing, he said, often seemed to embody the complexities of existence, intricacies he couldn’t yet understand, subjects he could only arrive at by completing his story. I didn’t know what the fountain was, let alone what it represented, but the dream had an urgency, as though it were a demand, more than a clue, something to pursue.

  In the end, the dream became the start of a story. Philip Roth, when beginning a book, would always ask himself, “If this book were a dream, it would be a dream of what?” I felt the reverse. “If this dream were a book,” I wondered, “it would be a book of what?” There was only one answer: a book of immortality.

  * * *

  The common impulse toward making one’s life worthwhile stems from our ambivalence about the meaning of de
ath. We’ve been granted the opportunity of a life’s time, so we try to be significant, notable—but why? Beyond the necessities of earning a living or of achieving status, every answer points toward our being terrified of death. The accomplishments we pursue, whether shooting for athletic excellence, expressing ourselves creatively, having children, striving to build a legacy that helps our fellow humans, or volunteering in the service of a charitable or spiritual cause, are all undertaken in the hopes of transcending mortality, of garnering a dash of salvation. We do and make to deal with oblivion.

  The urge to be a writer taps into this well as well. Poets “write their poems to ward off dying,” explains Harold Bloom. Horace felt that his contributions to the poetic arts ensured his immortality: “I shall not altogether die.” Anyone worried about living and dying in obscurity, wrote Chekhov, “reflectively snatches up a pencil and hastens to write his name on the first thing that comes handy.”

  Writing is an attempt to find a way out of a situation from which there is no way out, like Houdini escaping from a water-torture chamber, or a soul escaping a body. In John Fante’s view, writers try to “endow posterity with something like a monument” to their days upon this earth. But so do sculptors. And architects. And painters. And so on. It’s not just artists who are like this. In all our deepest reveries, immortality is always only a few synapse bursts away.

  Marketers long ago figured out how to tap into this basic desire to escape death. Gucci’s clothes are “what lasts forever.” The Canadian cookware company Paderno offers “pots for eternity.” Wine critics call the 1961 Jaboulet Hermitage “truly immortal,” but it’ll taste like vinegar in a few thousand years. Grocery stores stock utopia: in their gleaming aisles, everything is always in season and you can eat anything you want whenever you want. Even the meat there doesn’t seem to have come from actual living beasts. Nothing ever dies under those neon lights. Aeterna is the name of a flashy funeral home near my studio. Aeterna: a place to help you live on after death. Forever—for a fee.