We’ve talked about immortality. Have you heard about the ‘transhumanist’ movement? It’s for people who not only wouldn’t mind being mechanical (like that herd of giraffes over there), with carbon-fibre ‘blades’ instead of legs and so on; they also wouldn’t mind being electronic, equipped for instance with bat radar…How many of these questing Prometheans, I wonder, are on the minimum wage. No, unlike literature, transhumanism isn’t open to everybody…
I mean, who cares, but transhumanism sounds to me like an offshoot of cryonics – the live-forever scam. Had not the presidency intervened, Trump Immortality might well’ve been Donald J.’s next business move, after Trump Faith School and Trump Meatloaf…Obedient to cryonic guidance, you get your corpse bedded down in a vatlike icebox, and then you wait. Online I saw one of the ads: the photo of a man who looked like – who looked like a coiffed American sumo wrestler, in a tweed jacket and a huge equilateral tie knot, grinning in front of his fridge – empty, I’ll bet, except for a yoghurt and a couple of beers.
Under this individual’s care, your remains will look forward to a far-future society that for some reason will feel the need to defrost and revive a squad of self-infatuated and fatally diseased old dupes – ailing hoarders who did whatever they could to linger on in the counting house…
The dead-body freeze costs about $200,000, but it’s just 80,000 if you opt for ‘the neuro’ – the head-only package.
As on the question of the earthly utopia, so with eternal life: literature is unanimous in regarding human perfection or indefinite perpetuation as essentially horrific. Try this instead.
‘The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, / The vapours weep their burden to the ground, / Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, / And after many a summer dies the swan.’ Tennyson, ‘Tithonus’. I’ve noticed again and again that it is poetry, and poetry alone, that can face death on anything like equal terms.
Prose is too fast-moving. To face death it has to be slowed down to almost a processional pace. Jorge Luis Borges (who wrote a terrifying story called ‘The Immortal’) elsewhere surmised that ‘Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me away, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.’ Suggesting that death is not an intruder but a resident; the river, the tiger, the fire – they’re already there.
It is right, it is fitting, it is as it should be, that we die. ‘Death is the dark backing a mirror needs before we can see anything,’ wrote Saul Bellow. And without death there is no art, because without death there is no interest, or to be more precise there is no fascination (a fine word, that, and as Nabokov said of a different sort of fine word, ‘a welcome guest to my prose’). Fascination means, one, the tendency to engross irresistibly, and, two (semi-archaically), the ambition ‘to deprive (prey) of the ability to resist or escape the power of a gaze’…
Why is dying so hard, physically? That’s what I want to know. Oh, the toil, the slave labour of dying. Oh, the great sweat of death…
Time is the enemy of the writer as an individual, in that the longevity of talent hasn’t kept pace with other advances; but immortality, like utopia, is the enemy of writing tout à fait – root, bole, branch, and twig. Writers used to die young, remember (in common with absolutely everyone else)…Christopher had already outlasted Shakespeare, the Immortal, by a whole decade when I joined his death watch in Houston on December 15, 2011. My best friend was sixty-two. That is not right, that is not fitting, that is not as it should be.
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On December 16 I flew back from Houston to New York. Funnily and mistakenly enough, the weather was fresh and bright. But I was undeceived by the blue skies, or so I thought. This is a disaster, I kept telling myself again and again. This is clearly an absolute disaster…
I woke up the next morning in a state of puzzled self-exploration. Then I lived another day, December 17, at home with my family. And then another day, walking out once or twice in my neighbourhood and enjoying the customary interactions in the shops and outlets of Cobble Hill; and the morning after that I woke up changed. The feeling didn’t merely loiter – it had established itself. But I couldn’t trust it; I felt I just couldn’t trust it.
Then Blue, in one of our written exchanges, revealed that she had it too! Now, I’d lost a beloved friend; but Blue had lost a beloved spouse…When we met up for dinner in Manhattan we had a gripped and gripping exchange – like patients comparing symptoms, or more like a pair of hikers sharing notes about the same journey. We had both experienced it: an infusion, an invasion of overpowering happiness. Happiness: the delight of sentience. I asked her,
‘He wouldn’t be hurt, would he? Hurt that we’re not lying around ruined for ever?’
‘No! He’d be thrilled.’
‘…That’s true. Of course he would. He’d be thrilled.’
All right, this is what seemed to have taken place. The love of life of the Hitch – the existential amour fou of the Hitch, the ‘uncontrollable or obsessive passion’ – had in part transferred itself to us. And henceforth, we agreed, it would be our solemn duty to maintain it and to honour it.
After seven and a half years the happiness is still there, weakened or let’s say qualified by the narrowing stretch of time before I join him – as they used to put it. The happiness is also, I have to confide, slightly but persistently wrinkled by guilt. What am I guilty of, apart from surviving and living longer? It comes from a structural peculiarity of the death
