Tag Archives: death

Reaching for Immortality

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As anyone who has ever watched a cockroach or spider running for its life knows, all creatures, swimming, crawling, walking, running, leaping, and flying fear death as only death can be feared. However, as far as we know at present or are likely to know in the future, we are the only species whose members, once they have achieved a certain maturity, are aware that their own death is both inevitable and coming closer. Such being the case, and given the sapientia, (Latin: understanding, knowledge, wisdom) on which we pride ourselves so much, we are in a position to develop strategies to deal with it; or try to deal with it; or persuade ourselves that we are dealing with it. In these days when the dangers of corona are raising concern among billions of people around the world, I thought that outlining some of the strategies that have been or are being used for the purpose might be of some interest to my readers.

  1. Fame, power and wealth have always been interchangeable. However, of the three the first is the only one that can outlast death. Presumably that is why, as far back into history as we look and right down to the present day, people have sought it quite as eagerly as they did the second and the third. Some built pyramids, which considering that they have now lasted for forty-five centuries was not a bad investment. Some set out to conquer the world, as Alexander, Genghis Khan, and any number of lesser men did. Entire hosts of others ought immortality by means of literary, artistic, religious, philosophical and scientific achievement; as Thucydides, Horace and John Milton (all of whom explicitly said so), Phidias, the Buddha, Plato, and Newton did.
  2. Mummification. Famously, this is the method the ancient Egyptians, and by no means the Egyptians only, used. Some societies, especially in southeast Africa and parts of Indonesia, keep using it right down to the present day. The bodies, or should I say cadavers, are stripped. They are then cut open to remove the internal organs, specifically including the intestines and the brain (which, using a hook, is extracted by way of the nostrils). The body is then immersed in a special solution meant to extract its moisture—hence, its dried-up, wrinkled appearance—and stuffed so as to preserve its outline. Finally, it is wrapped in copious amounts of linen. The entire rather unwieldy thing may then be put into a coffin or several coffins that fit inside each other. Some mummies are accompanied by food, drink, household utensils, money, furniture, and the like. In China at any rate they were also attended by male and female personnel killed especially for the purpose; later statutes or statuettes, made of terra cotta or wood respectively, were substituted. Here it is not out of place to add that mummification is not limited to the ancient world but was also carried out on modern leaders such a Lenin, Stalin and Mao. In all three cases, with very mixed results.
  3. Reincarnation. The underlying idea of reincarnation is that, while the body may die, at least parts of the soul, or spirit (psyche, in Greek, anima, in Latin) do not. Instead, having left the body, it enters into another; though just how it does so and how much time elapses until it does is not very clear. In particular, Hindis and Buddhists believe that the souls of the deceased may enter not just into the bodies of men and women but into those of creatures of any kind. The soul of a person who has transgressed against religion, or perhaps one should say the proper way of life, may find himself in the body of a grasshopper. That of a person who has behaved himself, e.g by giving alms to monks or by contributing money towards the construction of a pagoda, in that of a higher-ranking man or woman. Reincarnation need not be a one-time affair. Instead, like the Energizer, will go on and on and on until Nirvanna, meaning either perfection and/or total oblivion, is achieved.
  4. Resurrection. At the heart of reincarnation is the idea that some part of the spirit remains alive even after death and that, doing so, it passes from one body to the next. Not so in the case of resurrection, at the core of which is the belief that people do in fact die but will be resurrected at some time thereafter. The role of resurrection in the Old Testament is fairly minor. Not so in the new one, where the reappearance of Jesus three days after he had been taken down from the cross and buried became an important, if not the most important, proof that he was indeed God’s son and appointed messenger. As Christianity solidified and spread during the coming centuries and millennia belief in resurrection became very widespread. In particular, two questions kept being debated and, at times, fought over. One was just when the end of days would arrive, an issue to which even the great Isaac Newton devoted much attention. The other, precisely who would be resurrected, on the strength of what (faith, good deeds, or predestination), what would happen to him or her after being resurrected (go to hell? partake of the leviathan? shelter in the bosom of Abraham?) and so on.
  5. Cryonics. A modern form of mummification is represented by a science, or perhaps it would be better to call it a pseudoscience, known as cryonics. The fact that extreme cold can greatly slow down or halt the pace at which the body disintegrates (rots away) after death has been known for a long, long time. Francis Bacon, the early seventeenth-century English lawyer, philosopher and experimentalist, died of bronchytis after trying to do just that by stuffing a dead chicken with snow. Now that the climate is warming up, repeatedly the frozen bodies of people and animals who died thousands of years ago are being found in places such as the Alps and Siberia. Routinely for several decades past eggs and sperms, both human and animal, have been frozen and stored for future use. More and more often stem cells are being treated in the same way, the idea being that they might one day be used to grow new organs in place of such as have been lost. Just as, in the past, one could pay monks to say masses for the soul of the deceased “in perpetuity,” so now there are quite some companies which, for a fee, will preserve a deceased person’s corpse by cooling it to minus 130 degrees Celsius. Having done so, they promise to keep it in its frozen state until, at some time in the future, technology will have advanced sufficiently for the person in question to be defrozen and reanimated.

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  6. Uploading. The most recent method for avoiding death is uploading. On one hand, brain scientists claim, there is little doubt that thought and emotion are, at bottom, nothing but electronic pulses which are passed by almost 100 billion cells, which are interlinked by at least 100 trillion connections. On the other, advances in computer science for the first time have resulted in hardware that may one day make it possible for computers to be provided with direct links to our brains. Not only might the contents—all the memories, all the thoughts, all the feelings, all the emotions—of each brain be put on a hard disk, or cloud, or some similar device, but we could preserve it for as long, and make as many copies of it as, we like. In this way what used to be known as our soul and is presently known as our personality would be preserved; whereas the rest of our bodies could be dispensed with.
  7. Replication/reassembly. As assorted gurus never stop saying, we live in the age of information. Meaning that, if only we could get to know the precise structure and characteristics of every single cell, molecule, and atom in our body, complete with the links between each of them and all the rest, we should be able to either replicate it—make exact copies—or reassemble it ex nihilo. Perhaps by using nanotechnology and/or some super-sophisticated three-dimensional printer?

Each of these approaches has its problems. Those surrounding the first were perhaps best described by Woody Allen. As he once said, “I do not want to live in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live in my apartment.” The second, mummification, may go a tiny little bit towards preserving the body’s outline. However, it cannot do anything at all to ensure the survival of the spirit; no mummy has ever moved, felt, thought, or spoken. The third, reincarnation, is based on pure belief and, since the soul is invisible, can never be proved to have taken place. How do you know that the fly buzzing around your desk has the soul that once belonged to your late grandfather, or that the grandfather you love so much used to be a horse in his previous life? The same applies to the fourth, resurrection; in this case proof, if it is possible at all, will have to wait until the Day of Judgment. The fifth, cryonics, the sixth, uploading, and the seventh replication/reassembly, are beset by all sorts of technical problems that make it more than doubtful whether they can ever succeed in their purpose.

My own conclusion from all this? Though good evidence is lacking, attempts to draw death’s sting probably got under way almost as soon as homo sapiens made his appearance 100-200,000 years ago. Probably the most successful one has been the first. As for the rest, not one of them has come even close to success, at least not the kind of experimentally-verifiable success that modern science would recognize as such; and chances are that none of them are going to do so anytime soon either.

Such being the case, we might as well return to the advice of Ecclesiastics:

Have a life with the woman you love all the days of your fleeting life, which has been given to you under the sun, all your fleeting days. For that is your portion in life and in your struggle under the sun.

Living with the Reaper

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In recent years we have been flooded with predictions about the ways in which we humans are reaching towards immortality, eventually becoming Homo Deus. Whether with the aid of computers that will store our minds even as the rest of us dies. Or with all sorts of new drugs and nannomachinery in our bloodstream. Or simply by having life expectancy increase by more than one year, each year.

Perhaps so. However, making such predictions is not what I am after here. Instead, let’s turn things the other way around. Suppose the Reaper is not going to be pushed out of the way. In that case, what other cardinal elements of life are going to stay more or less as they are?

Death brings two contradictory gifts. On one hand, it is the one thing in life that is even more certain than taxes. On the other, since we do not know when we are going to die, it makes life, as long as we have it, precarious. Even for those who, having admitted their guilt, are now on death row, unexpected things sometimes happen and hope dies last. Perhaps some kind of stay of execution would be issued, or an amnesty granted. Probably there have been few if any convicted persons who did not hope for a reprieve at the last moment. As, according to Herodotus, happened to King Croesus of Lydia. He was already bound to the stake when his executioner, King Cyrus of Persia, hearing him cry Solon! Solon! was overcome by curiosity and ordered him released so he could explain himself. Or the previous execution would be botched, leading to an investigation and a corresponding delay during which anything might happen. Or perhaps the prison in which they are held will be destroyed by an earthquake. Perhaps.

Both in- and outside of prison, it is this ignorance that makes life precarious. Young or old, is there anyone who can be certain that, leaving the home, he’ll return in one piece? Or that he’ll wake up next day and see the sun? It is also what makes it precious and endows it with a certain tang; one a thousand times stronger than, but perhaps not quite unlike, the kind that relish adds to many dishes. “What is food without salt? What is more tasteless than the white of an egg?” asked Job. Depending on circumstances as well as personality, some people may enjoy the tang as much as anything in life. At least for a time. “Nor law, nor duty bade me fight/Nor public man, nor cheering crowds/A lonely impulse of delight/Drove to this tumult in the clouds” wrote William Butler Yeats. Or as Siegfried Sassoon, the World War I English pacifist poet, told his family, the first days of the Battle of the Somme, the bloodiest ones in the whole of British military history, were “great fun.”

However, most of the time most people hate death, fear it, and try to push it as far away as they can. Either they do so by taking all sorts of precautions hundreds of which keep being listed on the Net every day. Or by pretending that it is of no account, as the Stoics did, or simply by refusing to think about it. Others still—probably the majority—vacillate between one extreme and the other. Most of the time we seek nothing more than a stable existence in which there is no threat. On occasion, though, a great many of us long for its opposite and make ready to confront it. “The strenuous life,” as Teddy Roosevelt called it, would not be worthy of the name had it not been accompanied by a whiff, perhaps more than a whiff, of danger. However we feel about it and try to cope with it, the precariousness that is the product of death is always there, inevitably and inescapably.

But that is only part of the story. While death makes life precarious, it also provides us with a kind of ballast, or keel, or compass. As it did to Don Quixote; reaching the end of a lifetime of delusions during which he fearlessly acted out an imaginary code of chivalry, he was brought back to his senses by the realization that death, his death, was both inevitable and imminent. And as it did to his real-life counterpart, Ignacio Loyola, who started life as a swashbuckling soldier and violent criminal but repented after being badly wounded and became the founder of the Jesuit Order. These and countless other examples seem to show that, but for death and our fear of it, we would have been capable of going to even greater extremes of folly than we actually are. We could, and probably would, have gone stark raving mad; with the unbearable lightness of being, if nothing else.

As many scholars have tried to explain the origins of religion as there are ants in a nest. Starting as long ago as Epicurus around 300 BCE, though, few of those scholars who did not allot death an important place among the factors involved. The ways various religions have dealt with death vary enormously. Some, notably those of ancient Greece and Rome, did not care whether, as long as people were alive, they were or were not virtuous, promising everyone the same dismal fate. But probably the majority prescribed all kinds of ways to prepare for death, either promising rewards to those who had behaved themselves or purification and/or punishment to those who had not. There is, indeed, a sense in which a religion which simply allows its adherents to pass away without bothering to tell them what may come next is not a religion at all. Either it is a philosophy, as skepticism was and Confucianism still is. Or else an ideology; as in the joke about the woman who, come her thirty-fifth birthday, returned her membership card in the Social-Democratic Party because she found out that its program had nothing to say about what would happen to her after she died.

One way or another, the sturdy child of death is religion. Facing what they believe were going to be the last moments of their lives, even stout atheists have been known to pray, sacrifice, make vows, and the like. Furthermore, today in most Western societies religion occupies a place of its own more or less carefully differentiated from all the reset. Not so in many, perhaps most, societies throughout history. In them the dividing line between secular and religious life hardly existed. Embedded in the former, so to speak, the latter often came close to forming the sum total of culture. Every institution, every move, however trivial, had to be approved by the religious authorities that be. Among orthodox Jews, such is the case right down to the present day. Thus human culture itself is, to a considerable extent, the product of death and awareness of it. Including architecture—from the pyramids down—painting, sculpture, musical and literary opuses, all kinds of symbolism and ritual—most secular rituals are modelled on religious ones—and what not.

As long as we live, the threat of death can cause us to draw more closely together. The outcome is a kind of intense solidarity hard for those who have not experienced it to comprehend. Here is what one very experienced fifteenth-century commander, Jean de Beuil, had to say about it in the Jouvencel: “You love your comrade so much in war…. And then you prepare to go and live or die with him and for love not to abandon him. And out of that there arises such delectation that he who has not tasted it is not fit to say what a delight is.” Similar sentiments permeate modern works such as Ernst Junger’s Im Stahlgewitter (In the Storm of Steel), to mention but one. That is not to say there are no limits. Too great and too imminent a threat of death is likely to lead to the cry of sauve qui peut at best and to a desperate struggle of all against all at worst. The kind of struggle that often breaks out when a building goes up in flames, trapping the men and women inside. The less cohesive and disciplined the unit or society, the more likely this is to happen. One may certainly exult over the death of an enemy, and indeed history knows of innumerable cases of this kind. What a delight, as happened to King Hezekiah of Judea in 701 BCE, to wake up in the morning and find 85,000 enemy soldiers, who were just about to capture one’s capital city, dead! And how wonderful, as soldiers of all times and places are known to have done, to cut off their extremities, mutilate them, and put them on show for the edification of friend and foe alike! As these and countless other examples prove, one thing the presence of death may do is to cause us to get used to it and grow callous. “Hard-bitten,” as the saying goes. It may also make us do terrible things which, but for it, we would never have thought about. Much of the time, though, death is accompanied by feelings of horror, pain, sorrow, regret, mourning and grief. Attitudes some of which we may have taken over from the members of some other species and which, whether or not that is the case, unquestionably form an essential part of what it means to be human.

It is pain and sorrow, too, which have led us towards empathy, compassion and remorse. Empathy and compassion for the dead and those whom they have left behind. Remorse for all the things we could have done for our dead but which, whether through malice or neglect, we did not. All these phenomena are among the quintessential characteristics of our lives, almost certainly as prevalent in prehistoric times as they are today. And none that could have existed, or could only have existed in very different, all but unimaginable, form, if it had not been for death. Whether a life without all of them would be human is moot—it may, indeed, not even be life at all.

But don’t worry. Long as our life expectancy has become, the flaming swords remain in place, guarding the gates of paradise and preventing us from eating the forbidden fruit. The reaper is there, waiting for each and every one of us. And pace Ray Kurzweil and other “transhumanists,” there is no way he is about to let us go.

No Escape

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Of Saint Augustine it used to be said that anyone who claimed to have read everything he wrote was lying. The same is true of Philip Roth. I do not claim to have read everything he has written. But I have read pretty much, and each time I add another volume I am astonished at how good a writer he really is.

The Dying Animal, the book I want to discuss today, just fell into my hands by accident. Published as long ago as 2001, it is as fresh today as it was then. The basic story is simple. The life of the protagonist, David Kepesh, has been described in some of Roth’s previous books. Now he is a moderately well-known art critic in New York. He appears on local TV and radio on a regular basis and teaches a class in “creative criticism.” Needless to say, most of his students are young women. Each year he immediately notices the one he wants. There are, however, any number of spoilsports around. That is why he waits until the course is over and all the grades have been handed out. At that point he invites the students to a party at his home, and the mating game can get under way.

Her name is Consuela Castillo. She is twenty-four to his sixty-two. As Roth is careful to point out, the attraction is mutual. He is attracted to her reverence for him as well as her beauty. Especially the erect way she carries herself (she is Cuban, and very proud) and her “powerful” breasts. The latter she is careful to put on show by keeping the upper three buttons of her blouse open. She is attracted to the courteous way he treats her, his relative renown, and his culture. In addition to being a literary critic he plays the piano, albeit not too well. So different from men of her own age who “masturbate” on her body, as she puts it.

Some feminist critics, desperately jealous of their younger “sisters,” have denounced Roth and his protagonist as typical male chauvinist pigs. For the benefit of any members of that extraordinary breed—feminists—who may be reading these lines, let me emphasize: Consuela is not an innocent victim. She has slept with men before. Even as she sleeps with David she also sleeps with others, including two brothers. She is neither too stupid to understand what is going on nor, as we soon learn, too weak to say no. In fact it is hard to say who, David or Consuela, leads the other in the minuet that slowly, inevitably, takes them to bed. By presenting Consuela as if she were an unwitting ninny, the critics in question do her a much greater injustice than David ever did. If, indeed, he did her any injustice at all.

In fact it is Kepesh, much the older of the two and very much aware of approaching death even when they are making love, who holds the weaker cards. She can throw him out at any time. A year and a half into their affair, when he refuses to join a party her family is throwing in which he would have to pretend he is nothing to her but a kindly old teacher, that is just what she does.
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The loss of Consuela sends David into a depression that lasts for years. What we, the readers, get are his memories and his thoughts. About sex, that enormously powerful drive no one, young or old, can ignore. About nature which, for reasons of its own, has made men basically polygamous (marriage kills sex, is what Roth says not only in this volume but in several others as well). About nature which, again for reasons of its own, has made women want nothing as much as children, which of course implies a long-term, stable, relationship even if, over time, it becomes sexless. About the man—David’s son—who, trapped into a marriage he hates, takes a mistress and is crushed by the resulting burden of guilt. About another man who, trapped into a marriage he hates, escapes from it, only to quickly enter into another one just like it.

About the young woman (not Consuela) who, overwhelmed by the freedom modern contraceptives provide her with, uses it to do exercise her right of sleeping around with anyone she wants and ends up with serial divorce and a nervous breakdown. About the woman who, determined to do whatever it takes to have a good career, attains that goal—only to discover that she is past the age at which one can fall deeply, deeply in love and that what she really wants, i.e. a family and children, is beyond her reach. About the childless couple who call five times a day so as to forget that, in reality, they have nothing to say to one another. And about the man and the woman, both of them unattached and independent and mature people, who are looking for a “pure” relationship based exclusively on free will and mutual attraction. Only to discover that time creates its own obligations and that such a relationship does not exist.

Another six and a half years have passed. David is seventy now. All of a sudden Consuela reenters his life. She is thirty-two, a young woman in the prime of life. Even better looking than before. But she has cancer. One of those glorious breasts is going to be cut off, and she worries no man will ever love her again. Besides, her chances of survival are just sixty percent. Of course she is terrified. Most of her immediate relatives having died, she turns—where else?—not to any of the young men she has slept with. But to the one man who, though he is no longer sexually attracted to her, she knows she can trust. Absolutely and unconditionally. She asks David to photograph those magnificent breasts of hers from every side and angle, which he obligingly does. Next thing he knows, she calls him. In the middle of the night. She needs him right by her side. And he knows that, if he goes, he will be “finished.”

Roth is too good a writer to tell us the outcome of all this. But the moral, I think, is clear. However much we may twist and turn, and however much feminists may rant and rave, neither men nor women can escape from what nature has made them.a