Part 8 (1/2)
Framed this way, as the sacrifice of the child by the father, the story is even harder to accept than the sacrifice of the self. For anyone who has a father, or a child, it is infinitely more painful and bewildering to contemplate than the failure of Gilgamesh, or the fall of Adam and Eve. The very horror of the story forces us to reflect on the ultimate reason for this sacrifice. Whatever else they do, these stories push us to explore in the strongest possible form the struggle within us between acceptance and defiance, defiance and acceptance, in the flow of the generations. Every father does pa.s.s the problem of mortality to his child, because he must. Every child receives the problem of mortality from the father, because he must. And framed as it is, this recurring story makes life's demands for acceptance and resistance impossible to decide for ourselves, impossible to resolve through reason, too much for mortal minds. This is the way it must be, the story says; we have to take it on faith.
The same story reappears in at least one more tradition: Lucretius retells the story of Agamemnon and Iphigeneia at the beginning of his epic poem The Way Things Are The Way Things Are, a heroic effort to replace the epics of Homer and religious faith with the epic of what we now call science. In Book One, at line 101, we find the battle cry of the rationalists: Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum, ”See what evils are done in the name of religion.” Lucretius's furious line became a slogan of the Enlightenment and made him a favorite poet of the birth of science. The Loeb edition notes: ”Voltaire, an ardent admirer of Lucretius, believed that line 101 would last as long as the world.”
Lucretius thought he could reason his way out of these terrors. Voltaire thought science could get us past them too. The modern age of the Enlightenment would dispel all darkness. But when we approach these questions now, through secular science, they are deep as ever. The problem of mortality does not go away when we look at it from a scientific point of view. The sacrifices are real and have always been real, our inheritances of loss, borne by each generation; and now we approach them from a new direction.
Some demographers predict, for instance, that we would want fewer children if we lived for hundreds or thousands of years. We see the trend already in the world's developed countries; the longer we live, the smaller the families we choose. The trend might increase with our life expectancy. Those alive would stay alive. Those unborn would stay unborn. Galileo observed something like this centuries ago when he mocked the folly of people who think they can buy eternity in gems. He had nothing but contempt for the romantic idea that rubies and emeralds are pieces of immortality, that ”diamonds are forever.” All of these dreams are ways of escaping for a moment from our mortal bodies, for getting off-in our imagination-from a mortal planet circling a mortal star. Fools, said Galileo, ”are reduced to talking this way, I believe, by their great desire to go on living, and by the terror they have of death. They do not reflect that if men were immortal, they themselves would never have come into the world.”
Mortality is sacrifice. And the great argument of Scripture and Paradise Lost Paradise Lost has its parallel now in a busy field of research, the study of the origins of aging at the level of single cells. A cell that reproduces by splitting in two will do better in the end if it divides unequally, with one half getting all the new parts, and the other half keeping some of the old parts. Cells began doing this very soon after the origin of life itself, more than three billion years ago. has its parallel now in a busy field of research, the study of the origins of aging at the level of single cells. A cell that reproduces by splitting in two will do better in the end if it divides unequally, with one half getting all the new parts, and the other half keeping some of the old parts. Cells began doing this very soon after the origin of life itself, more than three billion years ago.
According to present thinking, it all began with that first sacrifice. That was the moment when life invented aging. Those were the first cells doomed to age and die. From that moment on, mortality was ingrained within us.
Mortality is doubly ingrained in us, because it arose not once but twice. It was discovered first by those single cells, the authors of the first sacrifice, all those millions of years ago. And the invention of aging was so successful that life remained single-celled for two billion years-that is, for two-thirds of the time that there has been life on Earth. Even today, most of the life on the planet is still in the form of single cells.
Then, a billion years ago, for reasons that n.o.body understands, some of the single cells began to come together to form multicellular bodies. Some of the first colonies that formed were the ancestors of today's sponges, which are very simple colonies. They are essentially immortal. Their aging is negligible. Other early colonies were the ancestors of today's cnidarians, another large branch of the tree of life, which includes the hydra. The hydra lives in freshwater, but most cnidarians live in the sea, including sea anemones, corals, sea nettles, sea pens, and sea wasps-which are the world's most poisonous animals; their sting can kill in less than three minutes. The cnidarians include jellyfish and the Portuguese man-of-war. They have nerves and muscles, and some of them have eyes. But most of these thousands of species hardly age. Like the sponges, they can regenerate from a tiny piece, sometimes even from a few scattered cells. When sponges and cnidarians grow new cells, they just slough off the old ones. Any wastes that have built up in those old cells are gone, and the new cells start afresh. So the cells in those animals age and die, but their bodies live on and on.
These immortalists evolved early; they were some of the first multicellular animals on the planet. And then mortal animals evolved. Why? What advantage did they get from becoming mortal?
A sponge has no nervous system. A hydra has networks of nerves but no brain. Both animals shed their nerves the way they shed the cells that make up their skin and their muscles, and then grow new ones. The forests of delicate synapses, which tie all our long-lived nerves together in the bundles we call the nervous system, were among the most important inventions in the history of life. They allowed animals to store more and more information. Long-lived neurons allowed them to maintain a historical memory, to learn from their experience and carry experience forward. The hydra loses its memories along with its old cells. Its memories go up in the flame and ash of the Phoenix. That is a price it pays for the gift of being born anew. Although the hydra lives much longer than its nerves, it sheds its experiences with them-whereas the nerves in a nervous system can last a lifetime, and with them, we have the memories of a lifetime.
Nerves are cells, and all cells acc.u.mulate wastes and damage. They age, but they are so specialized that they can no longer be replaced. The cells in the bone marrow proliferate as long as we live, as do the cells that line our guts. They divide and divide, and any junk that's built up in them is diluted again and again so that they stay clean. In this way, the bone marrow and the linings of our guts and the cells of our liver can be said to be virtually immortal, like the hydra. But the highly specialized cells of our brains are mortal, and so are the cells of our hearts.
In essence, then, that was the second beginning of old age and mortality, in the evolution of these specialists. Ever since, animals with those kinds of long-lived but mortal cells have acc.u.mulated damage, and eventually they have failed. Because key parts of our bodies cannot last, we do not build the rest of our bodies to last. Ultimately, then, the cells that give us our ident.i.ties are the ones that bring us down to the grave.
Terman and Brunk, the authors of the Garbage Catastrophe hypothesis, are among the gerontologists who have advanced this argument: that the need for the nerves brought death into the world a second time. They argue that our long-lived muscles may also have played a part in this second invention of mortality. What we call muscle memory emerges from a combination of the complex patterns we have laid down with our muscles and the firing of our nerves. It may be that the spectacularly complicated and graceful behavior of the more complex animals owes a great deal to their long-lived muscle fibers and long-lived nerves, lasting as long as the body itself.
This invention may have allowed the amazing diversification of life-forms that we call the Cambrian Explosion. If so, the invention of aging, the feature that ingrains our mortality in our flesh, made us such a success on the planet Earth.
The development of those long-lived cells would also have precluded reproduction by budding, which is the main way that hydra makes another hydra. It would have driven the evolution of the separation of bodies into the disposable soma and the protected germ cells, the s.e.x cells. And so it would have furthered and spurred the evolution of aging. And it would have made possible something else, too. Animals with dangerous lives would have grown up fast and reproduced fast before they died. About half the animals on this planet are short-lived insects. But animals that found their way into protected niches could afford to slow down. Then they could benefit more and more from their long-lived muscles and memories. They could grow more and more intelligent. One animal line that did this more than any other was our own, the species h.o.m.o sapiens h.o.m.o sapiens. We lost the gift of living more or less indefinitely, of aging negligibly. We lost the gift of living more or less negligently, without being aware of our losses. But we gained the gift of memory, of memories that can last all our lives.
We have what the hydra does not have. We have a sense of ourselves that goes back to our beginnings and looks ahead toward the infinitely various possibilities that surround our end. We exist, and we know we exist. But the price we pay is that we age, and that we know we age. The price we pay is that we know we are mortals.
And we must wrestle with these questions of acceptance or defiance.
Chapter 11.
THE TROUBLE WITH IMMORTALITY.
When we consider the problem of aging, and imagine that we might be able to cure it, that alternating current we feel consists of longings and dread. We are afraid of what we wish for; and most of our fears, like our hopes, have always cycled in us.
In Jewish legend, the Phoenix lived in the city of Luz. G.o.d had spared the city after Adam and Eve fell from grace because he wanted just one place on Earth to be safe from the Angel of Death. Neither Death nor Nebuchadnezzar with all his armies could storm the walls of Luz. Its citizens lived without war, flood, famine, fire, or fear. Their histories were miraculously complete; nothing was ever lost-not one hair, not a single name. There was no gate in the city walls; otherwise, everyone on Earth would have come pouring through. The only entrance was a secret pa.s.sage through the hollow trunk of an almond tree that grew outside the wall. (Luz is Hebrew for ”almond.”) is Hebrew for ”almond.”) Luz was the last secret patch of Paradise, almost a Heaven on Earth. King David, who had sung, and played on his harp, so many mournful psalms about mortality; and who had slept with a young girl in his old age to try to rejuvenate his cold, failing body-King David lived on in the city of Luz, singing psalms to Heaven, presumably with no more lamentations. All the great ones of the past were still there, living on and on, forever as they had been. Every man and woman of Luz was like the Luz bone, the coccyx-according to legend, the very last bone to decay in the grave.
And yet, every now and then one of the immortal men or women of Luz would suddenly say goodbye, escape under the wall, go out through the hollow trunk of the almond tree, and wander out into the world. The wise men of Luz wondered why these people left. The wise women of Luz talked about it into the night. They concluded that some citizens of Luz must grow tired of living-bored with immortality. Why else could they possibly want to leave the city of the immortals?
Alas, after the bored and the restless pa.s.sed through the cave below the city and crawled out through the hollow trunk and walked away, no one ever saw them again. They were met by the Angel of Death, who buried them in the fields.
”People are always worrying about boredom,” Aubrey de Grey told me once, ”and it's a complete joke. I could perfectly well live till I was a million years old and I would never get bored of punting.” And that may well be true. But it's also true that dreams of immortality have led to terrible nightmares of boredom ever since people began writing down their thoughts.
”Consider how long you have done the same thing,” says Seneca; ”a man may wish to die not because he is brave or miserable, but because he is discriminating.”
Francis Bacon repeats the point in his essay ”Of Death”: ”A man would die, though he were neither valiant nor miserable, only upon a weariness to do the same thing so oft over and over.”
For one of Darwin's early supporters, Ernst Haeckel, the mere thought of such heavy boredom was more than enough to outweigh his immortal longings. In Riddle of the Universe Riddle of the Universe, published at the turn of the twentieth century, Haeckel writes, ”Any impartial scholar who is acquainted with geological calculations of time, and has reflected on the long series of millions of years the organic history of the earth has occupied, must admit that the crude notion of an eternal life is not a comfort comfort, but a fearful menace menace, to the best of men. Only want of clear judgment and consecutive thought can dispute it.... Even the closest family ties would involve many a difficulty. There are plenty of men who would gladly sacrifice all the glories of Paradise if it meant the eternal companions.h.i.+p of their 'better half' and their mother-in-law.”
There may be plenty of women who would make the same sacrifice.
The Czech writer Karel apek wrote a play on this theme, The Makropulos Affair The Makropulos Affair, first performed during the winter of 1922 at the Vinohrady Theatre in Prague. The heroine is Elena Makropulos, an opera singer, 342 years old, who has aged through boredom into ”frozen, soulless emptiness.” apek, who wrote what we would now call science fiction (in his play R.U.R. R.U.R., he coined the term ”robot”), defended his tragic portrait of Elena in a note to his audience. ”Does the optimist believe that it is bad to live sixty years but good to live three hundred? I merely think that when I proclaim a life of the ordinary span of sixty years as good enough in this world, I am not guilty of criminal pessimism.” (apek died at forty-eight.) The Czech composer Leo Janaek turned the play into an opera about the boredom of eternal life, and the philosopher Bernard Williams made it the basis of a celebrated essay, ”The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality.”
”Who the h.e.l.l wants to live forever? Most of us, apparently; but it's idiotic,” Truman Capote writes in his essay ”Self-Portrait.” ”After all, there is is such a thing as life-saturation: the point when everything is pure effort and total repet.i.tion.” such a thing as life-saturation: the point when everything is pure effort and total repet.i.tion.”
You can have a horror of death and and a dread of eternal repet.i.tion. Woody Allen seems to suffer from both. He once said, ”As long as they are mortals, human beings won't be totally relaxed.” And he said, ”I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.” But he also said, ”Eternity is a long time, especially towards the end.” a dread of eternal repet.i.tion. Woody Allen seems to suffer from both. He once said, ”As long as they are mortals, human beings won't be totally relaxed.” And he said, ”I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.” But he also said, ”Eternity is a long time, especially towards the end.”
In fact, for some people, even the life span we have now is boring; they already feel they are too long for this world. To fill the time they act like the G.o.ds on Olympus, manufacturing excitement; or like the restless souls in Luz, testing the edges of mortality. Olympus was for the ancient Greeks, as Luz was for ancient Jews, an eternal reward for some of the greatest heroes, including Hercules, who struggled all his life with the problem of mortality. Hercules rescued Prometheus from his chains on the cliff. Hercules fought with Geras, who represented hideous Old Age. Hercules wrestled with Death himself, to rescue the wife of Admetus. When the poison of the Hydra killed him in the end, he was allowed to ascend to Mount Olympus. There Hercules married Hebe, the G.o.ddess of youth. But what did the immortals do all day every day on the eternal mountain? They squabbled like mortals; they relieved their boredom by watching the mortals down on the plain. Not even the Greeks could imagine a way to escape the tedium of immortality.
Tortured mortals tie their brief time on Earth into knots. The seven deadly sins take them to the edge of the city of life, or out of it. All kinds of craziness lift us out of time, and then return us home, feeling almost reborn (if not necessarily refreshed). Even people who lead outwardly calm lives find paths to the edge. The most petty, trivial idiocies can yield that strange thrill of having flirted with the Angel of Death, just beyond the Luz tree. Procrastination is not one of the seven deadly sins, but those who work hard at it do sometimes achieve a near-death experience.
Of course, as an argument against immortality, the problem of boredom cuts both ways. Most of us have learned to deal with it already. And we all know people for whom boredom is not an issue in life-or at least, people who finesse the issue with brio again and again. A while back, a guest came to dinner who had made a brilliant success of seven careers, beginning with law, journalism, and politics. He'd served as a senior vice president at a bank and as the city manager of one of the biggest and hardest-to-manage cities in the United States. It was no Luz, and it wasn't boring. Now he spent more and more time with his grandchildren, although he'd begun yet another career on the side, as the founder and president of a humanitarian nonprofit organization. Sitting on my terrace above Broadway, he picked up a book I was reading at the time, The Denial of Death The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker; opened it at random; and read a pa.s.sage aloud: A person spends years coming into his own, developing his talent, his unique gifts, perfecting his discriminations about the world.... And then the real tragedy...that it takes sixty years of incredible suffering and effort to make such an individual, and then he is good only for dying.... He has to go the way of the gra.s.shopper, even though it takes longer.
My guest laughed. He was sixty.
I said, ”I'm glad you're laughing.”
People like that might find good things to do if they had a thousand years. On reflection most of us can think of at least a few things we'd like to do. A playwright wrote to me after we talked about it. At first he'd been horrified by the thought of boredom. Now he allowed, ”Time to read everything would be one of the consolations of immortality.”
But I think boredom may be merely an intimation of much deeper fears about our oldest dream. Most immortalists a.s.sume that we would attain a state of maturity, presumably of young maturity, and stop there for centuries. In other words, if we engineer a state of negligible senescence, we will cease to travel through the seven ages of man. We might choose to stop at the third age, the age of the lover, ”Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad / Made to his mistress' eyebrow.” Or we might linger at the fourth age, the age of the soldier, ”Full of strange oaths, sudden and quick in quarrel, / Seeking the bubble reputation / Even in the cannon's mouth.” Elena Makropulos, the opera singer, spent 300 years at the age of forty-two.
Wherever we stopped, the fact of having stopped there would do strange things to us, because none of life's stages makes much sense in itself; each makes sense only in relation to the next and the next, only in a series. Without the sense of a progress through life, life is a kind of stasis. Ident.i.ty itself is stasis, or it would not be ident.i.ty. My guest on the terrace had come as close as anyone I know to having a series of lives, hopping from one to the next-but he'd kept his family and friends, and he'd kept himself. That is, he'd been recognizably himself in every one of his careers. Our character is fixed because we do so much imprinting in our first, second, and third ages. In our first age, we imprint on language. In our second age, we imprint on music. In our third age, we imprint on the work of a lifetime, if we're lucky; and on the love of a lifetime, if we're very lucky. And after that? Then, the working out of the plans. It's all arranged, in some sense. Life after those first three ages feels like an unfolding, a development, although we do have to build the particulars of each new stage with infinite labors and pains. As we grow and live and choose, always with a sense of discovery, we build on the givens; we work from our first premises, pursuing those first loves. The rest of the seven ages are, in effect, a playing out of an ident.i.ty that has become, in most ways, permanent and indelible.
So how would it work out if we had a thousand years at one of those seven stages? In life as we know it, each stage is a waypoint on the way to the endpoint. A huge part of the action and the drama in the seven ages comes from the sense of an ending, the knowledge that all these ages must have an end. ”Immortality, or a state without death, would be meaningless,” argues Williams, the philosopher, in his essay ”The Makropulos Case,” because ”death gives meaning to life.”
Again, we're talking here only about the deepest problems of existence. They make even the philosophers shrug, or crack jokes. In his essay, Williams quotes Sophocles: ”Never to have been born counts highest of all”-and the wry old Jewish reply, ”How many are so lucky? Not one in ten thousand.”
Nevertheless, it is true that most of us wend our way through the seven ages with a sense that we are making a journey in the world. Each of us feels like one pilgrim on one journey, lost or found. That is why Dante could capture each of his characters in a single image, in the Inferno Inferno, the Purgatorio Purgatorio, and the Paradiso Paradiso. He saw the people he had known in his native Florence as they were in eternity, quintessentially themselves. (The critic Erich Auerbach calls Dante the great poet of the secular world.) If each of those Florentines had lived in the flesh for an eternity, or even for a mere thousand years, could any of them still say they had been true to their first loves? Would their lives have retained any shape at all? Elena Makropulos's problem wasn't being forty-two, Williams writes. ”Her problem lay in having been at it for too long.” She was bored because ”everything that could happen and make sense to one particular human being of 42 had already happened to her.” At least, everything that could happen to and make sense to a woman of a certain character had happened. Her character had long since formed; her destiny had been formed by her character. Nothing remained but to live it out over and over again, like an endless performance of exactly the same song. We are performers of the self, we are playwrights of our lives, and we need death to bring down the curtain, or the play will go on too long; the story will lose all shape and cease to be a story at all.
In short, we are afraid that we will gain a world of time and lose our souls.