The Secrets of Immortality
Listen to me: mortality is not so bad. Not when you know, really know and understand the alternative. Yes, mortality gives you a deadline – in a literal sense – by which time you must (you won’t) get everything done, but that is a good thing. Being finite, life gives you a sense of urgency. An incentive to get things done, and to enjoy the moment while it lasts.
Incidentally, death is never on time. It always comes too soon, or too late, and sometimes the latter is the more tragic. But the beautiful, the inevitable and ineffable thing about death is, it comes. And in coming, brings an end to pain and sorrow. Oh yes, I can hear you say, ‘Also an end to happiness. Dreams. Love.’ But, my friend, those things will desert you soon, too soon, if you become immortal.
You don’t believe me. That is fair. Only when you’ve trodden the path of immortality as long as I have would you know the heaviness of the truth I speak. I know, I know, I am wasting my time sharing this truth. Even after you’ve heard my tale, you would still seek to join me in immortality.
‘I would be wiser about it,’ you’d say. ‘I’d do it better. I would plan and learn and save, and be rich and happy for ever.’
‘Times have changed,’ you would undoubtedly declare with a hint of triumph in your voice. ‘What happened to you would not happen to me.’
You would at least be right about that last statement. You would find an entirely original route to eternal misery.
But enough. Let me tell you about my experience in the hope that it would somehow dissuade you from ever seeking endless life.
I can still remember when I discovered the first secret of immortality: how to become an immortal. Oh, I thought I was so clever! So blessed!
The silly thing is, that first secret is far too easy to find. If I told you, you would laugh, as I did, at how effortlessly one can attain eternal life. But I won’t tell you, because in spite of my warnings you would wish to become immortal yourself. I care about you enough, without even knowing you, to spare you that fate. Were I to share that first, all-important secret with you, so you may bring me the comfort of being a companion for the millennia of desolation to come, you would come to hate me for what I had done to you, and in spite of our best efforts we would never be able to exterminate each other. So please, do not ask. Let me get on with my story.
Once I found the secret, in no time at all, without giving it a second thought, I availed myself of it.
At first, there was no change. I felt no different, thought no special, eternal thoughts nor saw any divine truths hidden in the universe.
Life went on. I knew in my heart that I would live forever, so I made a few changes. I set about saving money, knowing that even a little in the present can become a great deal in a distant future. I became more studious, against the day when, by sheer longevity of service I would come to lead, even to own the company where I worked. Who knew, perhaps one day I would come to lead the world, and it would not do for me to be an ignoramus were that to occur.
I learned languages, stayed healthy. Life was sunny, my prospects were grand. All I had to do was let time do its inexorable work. The impermanence of my peers would in the end leave me peerless – above all.
But as the years meandered by, I discovered the second secret of immortality. In retrospect, it should have been obvious, and yet, somehow its realisation came as a terrible shock. That second secret is: immortality stops death, not time. And aging is linked to the clock, not the life force. I continued to age as normally as those around me, and this sparked the first inkling that maybe this gift would not be quite what I had imagined it would be.
Still, I remained optimistic. I would soon be rich enough to overcome the disadvantages of age, to live in comfort and indulgence, to pay for youthful company when I desired it, and to thumb my nose at conceits such as decorum and social acceptability. After all, I would outlive all of my detractors.
However, this second secret of immortality, that it does not halt the arrow of time, holds awful consequences. One is that one’s memory does not expand to accommodate the accumulation of memories over lifetimes, and then centuries. One forgets. I have been present at so many critical junctures of history, met so many wonderful, unforgettable people and achieved so many incredible feats, that I should be able to live out the countless years to come basking in memories. But much has gone, and even more is foggy at best. Only the most agonising memories remain fresh and ineradicable.
But this is a mere trifle compared to the fact that for we immortals, the aging process does not at some point magically halt. If you think a person who has lived to be over a century looks old, consider me at over two hundred and fifty. I am a shrivelled, desiccated husk – but more on that later. Suffice to say, immortality does not equal agelessness, and I have aged so much I am no longer even recognisable as a human.
The third secret of immortality, perhaps a necessary corollary of the second, is even more horrifying. Over the course of several years in the mid-nineteenth century I learned that immortality does no more prevent illness, injury, pain and distress than it does confer endless youth. This was a hard lesson to learn.
In 1858, while walking along the Boulevard Beaumarchais in Paris, I stepped in front of an omnibus. The impact would have killed anyone else, but of course I survived. My left leg was horribly mangled and smashed, my left arm broken, and my internal organs bruised and bleeding.
Over many, many years I learned to walk again, but the limp stayed with me; pronounced, uncomfortable and unattractive. Worse, while I was still in rehabilitation from that accident, having exhausted my entire fortune on doctors and hospitals, and therefore being relegated to the lowest, most polluted of sanatoria, I contracted smallpox. Again, unlike so many others, I did not die. But the disease left me foully disfigured, a misshapen, hideous creature of a man.
As the nineteenth century became the twentieth, I remained in hiding. The agony has never left me, but the hopes I once held that I would one day command a fortune, possibly rule the world, fled quickly and permanently. My only consolation was that my family and all of my friends were long gone.
I tried several times to kill myself, but the results have only ever been more astonished doctors and more scars. The armies that fought the many wars of that last century wouldn’t take me, and the women left behind would not even look at me. As the century grew old, I became ancient. My appearance became ever more shrunken, bent and repulsive as my skin dried and withered, my bones weakened and decayed, and the last of my hair fell out.
I hid in a cave for decades, never venturing out even for food, choosing to endure the relentless torment of hunger and thirst rather than be seen.
At some time early in this twenty-first century, I was found by explorers and dragged unwilling from my sanctuary. A medical curiosity once again, I was for a time installed in an intensive care ward and rehydrated and fed, and to an extent rejuvenated. But I was already so old, so infirm and broken, incapable of uttering more than a croaked word or two, that eventually a conference of experts decided that I should be disconnected from food, water and medicines, and left to expire.
When, some weeks after that plan was put into effect, I had neither perished nor shown any inclination to do so soon, they removed me to a small hidey-hole in the roof of the hospital. Although I was still a biological mystery, I was also a nuisance because I would not do them the courtesy of shuffling off. So at last they abandoned me to this niche, where I have already subsisted through generations of doctors, nurses and patients.
Once a week a nurse is sent in to check on me, but as I ingest nothing but breath, I emit nothing but fumes. I am the dried, wizened core of a human that is left when everything but the life force itself has fallen off, rotted or been eaten away. An undying, forgotten relic that remains only to disappear, which is the one thing I cannot do.
One day soon, perhaps sooner than even I envisage, the rest of the human race will be gone from this planet. Entropy will do its steadfast work on all of the artefacts of humanity, and this building, the city around it, and everything else my species built, will fall and decompose. When that happens, I will lay exposed to the elements, perhaps to be gnawed on by animals yet to evolve, perhaps to be left alone as something noxious and unearthly. Then all that remains is to wait out the billions of years to come, until the earth is at last swallowed by the sun and my atoms are scattered to the empty sky. Will I then be gone? Oh, I hope so.
Incidentally, death is never on time. It always comes too soon, or too late, and sometimes the latter is the more tragic. But the beautiful, the inevitable and ineffable thing about death is, it comes. And in coming, brings an end to pain and sorrow. Oh yes, I can hear you say, ‘Also an end to happiness. Dreams. Love.’ But, my friend, those things will desert you soon, too soon, if you become immortal.
You don’t believe me. That is fair. Only when you’ve trodden the path of immortality as long as I have would you know the heaviness of the truth I speak. I know, I know, I am wasting my time sharing this truth. Even after you’ve heard my tale, you would still seek to join me in immortality.
‘I would be wiser about it,’ you’d say. ‘I’d do it better. I would plan and learn and save, and be rich and happy for ever.’
‘Times have changed,’ you would undoubtedly declare with a hint of triumph in your voice. ‘What happened to you would not happen to me.’
You would at least be right about that last statement. You would find an entirely original route to eternal misery.
But enough. Let me tell you about my experience in the hope that it would somehow dissuade you from ever seeking endless life.
I can still remember when I discovered the first secret of immortality: how to become an immortal. Oh, I thought I was so clever! So blessed!
The silly thing is, that first secret is far too easy to find. If I told you, you would laugh, as I did, at how effortlessly one can attain eternal life. But I won’t tell you, because in spite of my warnings you would wish to become immortal yourself. I care about you enough, without even knowing you, to spare you that fate. Were I to share that first, all-important secret with you, so you may bring me the comfort of being a companion for the millennia of desolation to come, you would come to hate me for what I had done to you, and in spite of our best efforts we would never be able to exterminate each other. So please, do not ask. Let me get on with my story.
Once I found the secret, in no time at all, without giving it a second thought, I availed myself of it.
At first, there was no change. I felt no different, thought no special, eternal thoughts nor saw any divine truths hidden in the universe.
Life went on. I knew in my heart that I would live forever, so I made a few changes. I set about saving money, knowing that even a little in the present can become a great deal in a distant future. I became more studious, against the day when, by sheer longevity of service I would come to lead, even to own the company where I worked. Who knew, perhaps one day I would come to lead the world, and it would not do for me to be an ignoramus were that to occur.
I learned languages, stayed healthy. Life was sunny, my prospects were grand. All I had to do was let time do its inexorable work. The impermanence of my peers would in the end leave me peerless – above all.
But as the years meandered by, I discovered the second secret of immortality. In retrospect, it should have been obvious, and yet, somehow its realisation came as a terrible shock. That second secret is: immortality stops death, not time. And aging is linked to the clock, not the life force. I continued to age as normally as those around me, and this sparked the first inkling that maybe this gift would not be quite what I had imagined it would be.
Still, I remained optimistic. I would soon be rich enough to overcome the disadvantages of age, to live in comfort and indulgence, to pay for youthful company when I desired it, and to thumb my nose at conceits such as decorum and social acceptability. After all, I would outlive all of my detractors.
However, this second secret of immortality, that it does not halt the arrow of time, holds awful consequences. One is that one’s memory does not expand to accommodate the accumulation of memories over lifetimes, and then centuries. One forgets. I have been present at so many critical junctures of history, met so many wonderful, unforgettable people and achieved so many incredible feats, that I should be able to live out the countless years to come basking in memories. But much has gone, and even more is foggy at best. Only the most agonising memories remain fresh and ineradicable.
But this is a mere trifle compared to the fact that for we immortals, the aging process does not at some point magically halt. If you think a person who has lived to be over a century looks old, consider me at over two hundred and fifty. I am a shrivelled, desiccated husk – but more on that later. Suffice to say, immortality does not equal agelessness, and I have aged so much I am no longer even recognisable as a human.
The third secret of immortality, perhaps a necessary corollary of the second, is even more horrifying. Over the course of several years in the mid-nineteenth century I learned that immortality does no more prevent illness, injury, pain and distress than it does confer endless youth. This was a hard lesson to learn.
In 1858, while walking along the Boulevard Beaumarchais in Paris, I stepped in front of an omnibus. The impact would have killed anyone else, but of course I survived. My left leg was horribly mangled and smashed, my left arm broken, and my internal organs bruised and bleeding.
Over many, many years I learned to walk again, but the limp stayed with me; pronounced, uncomfortable and unattractive. Worse, while I was still in rehabilitation from that accident, having exhausted my entire fortune on doctors and hospitals, and therefore being relegated to the lowest, most polluted of sanatoria, I contracted smallpox. Again, unlike so many others, I did not die. But the disease left me foully disfigured, a misshapen, hideous creature of a man.
As the nineteenth century became the twentieth, I remained in hiding. The agony has never left me, but the hopes I once held that I would one day command a fortune, possibly rule the world, fled quickly and permanently. My only consolation was that my family and all of my friends were long gone.
I tried several times to kill myself, but the results have only ever been more astonished doctors and more scars. The armies that fought the many wars of that last century wouldn’t take me, and the women left behind would not even look at me. As the century grew old, I became ancient. My appearance became ever more shrunken, bent and repulsive as my skin dried and withered, my bones weakened and decayed, and the last of my hair fell out.
I hid in a cave for decades, never venturing out even for food, choosing to endure the relentless torment of hunger and thirst rather than be seen.
At some time early in this twenty-first century, I was found by explorers and dragged unwilling from my sanctuary. A medical curiosity once again, I was for a time installed in an intensive care ward and rehydrated and fed, and to an extent rejuvenated. But I was already so old, so infirm and broken, incapable of uttering more than a croaked word or two, that eventually a conference of experts decided that I should be disconnected from food, water and medicines, and left to expire.
When, some weeks after that plan was put into effect, I had neither perished nor shown any inclination to do so soon, they removed me to a small hidey-hole in the roof of the hospital. Although I was still a biological mystery, I was also a nuisance because I would not do them the courtesy of shuffling off. So at last they abandoned me to this niche, where I have already subsisted through generations of doctors, nurses and patients.
Once a week a nurse is sent in to check on me, but as I ingest nothing but breath, I emit nothing but fumes. I am the dried, wizened core of a human that is left when everything but the life force itself has fallen off, rotted or been eaten away. An undying, forgotten relic that remains only to disappear, which is the one thing I cannot do.
One day soon, perhaps sooner than even I envisage, the rest of the human race will be gone from this planet. Entropy will do its steadfast work on all of the artefacts of humanity, and this building, the city around it, and everything else my species built, will fall and decompose. When that happens, I will lay exposed to the elements, perhaps to be gnawed on by animals yet to evolve, perhaps to be left alone as something noxious and unearthly. Then all that remains is to wait out the billions of years to come, until the earth is at last swallowed by the sun and my atoms are scattered to the empty sky. Will I then be gone? Oh, I hope so.