{"id":19792,"date":"2012-08-28T11:43:00","date_gmt":"2012-08-28T10:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/?p=19792"},"modified":"2012-08-28T11:43:00","modified_gmt":"2012-08-28T10:43:00","slug":"richard-smith-perhaps-i-could-live-forever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2012\/08\/28\/richard-smith-perhaps-i-could-live-forever\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Smith: Perhaps I could live forever"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"RichardI\u2019m sitting in first class on the train to Edinburgh with two glasses of red wine inside me when I look across the water to Lindisfarne and suddenly think \u201cPerhaps I could live forever.\u201d This was a revelation because until now I\u2019ve been unequivocal that immortality would be unbearable.<\/p>\n

It must have been partly the wine, but more it was remembering when I walked the St Cuthbert\u2019s Way with my brother and ended in Lindisfarne. At night I looked from my bedroom window and saw lights flickering on the other Farne Islands. I\u2019m clear that I want to go back, but I\u2019m 60: I may never go back. But I\u2019d like to go back more than once. Would I really tire of Lindisfarne if I returned every five years for the rest of time?<\/p>\n

My flirtation with immortality has also been brought on by the books I\u2019m reading. Every morning I read for an hour, sometimes longer. I read a novel, currently The Magic Mountain<\/em>, a book of non-fiction, currently Neal Ferguson\u2019s The Ascent of Money<\/em>, and a poetry book, currently Ted Hughes\u2019s versions of Ovid\u2019s Metamorphoses<\/em>. I\u2019m reading The Magic Mountain<\/em> for the second time, and I can imagine reading it every 10 years forever. Indeed, I\u2019d like to. Just as important, however, are all the other books that I want to reread and the books I have already added to my \u201cto read\u201d list.<\/p>\n

The main argument against immortality is that you would eventually be so bored that you would long to die. You would come to the end of everything. The case against immortality is made powerfully in the opera The Makropulos Case<\/em>, where Elina Makropulos, who is 342 years old but has the body and mind of a 42 year old, longs for death and refuses a second dose of the elixir that has given her immortality<\/a>. Even this mild dose of immortality\u2014what\u2019s 342 years compared 100 000\u2014has been too much.<\/p>\n

But would I ever get to the end of books\u2014or music, which is almost as important to me? People are writing good books far faster than I\u2019m able to read them. Surely I would never grow bored of books\u2014or music? Not only would I want to read new books, I\u2019d also want to reread the ever increasing number of books I had already read. \u201cOne learns nothing from reading only from rereading,\u201d an Oxbridge don once said.<\/p>\n

I might grow tired of Lindisfarne, but would I grow tired of even our small islands?\u00a0 I love to walk, and I have probably walked less than 1% of all the footpaths in Britain. As I travel from London to Edinburgh I always look for the few places where I have crossed the line on foot. I\u2019ve never walked through most of the countryside I see from the train, but most of it looks inviting. I\u2019d love to explore it, and doesn\u2019t it offer infinite variation?<\/p>\n

My musings are, of course, predicated on the idea that I would not age anymore. I\u2019m not interested to spend even a few years demented, deaf, blind, immobile, and Parkinsonian, the only kind of \u201cimmortality\u201d that medicine has to offer at the moment.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m unsure as well about relationships. One of the ways that I\u2019ve always dismissed immortality and made the case for death has been to say: \u201cImagine being editor of the BMJ<\/em> for another 5000 years.\u201d Thirteen years was enough for me and probably more than enough for BMJ<\/em> readers. Similarly my wife has done heroically to stick me for nearly 40 years. She might manage another 20, but to ask for more than that would be inhuman.<\/p>\n

So, as we reach the other side of Berwick on Tweed, I\u2019m thinking that I might give a version of immortality\u2014one based on books, music, and walking, largely alone\u2014a go, when my brother rings me. I tell him about my dalliance with immortality. \u201cBut that\u2019s nonsense,\u201d he says. If you live forever you\u2019ll have read every book, been everywhere, done everything. It\u2019s a simple matter of maths. You\u2019ll be bored witless.\u201d<\/p>\n

But is he right? I detect a paradox here. If people are writing good books faster than I can read them, how can I run out of books to read? This is a version of Xeno\u2019s paradox, whereby an arrow fired at St Sebastian has to go half the distance, then half the remaining distance, ad infinitum, so proving, says Tom Stoppard, that St Sebastian died of fright. Infinity and zero are tricky things for us humans to grasp.<\/p>\n

The debate over immortality continues during my visit to Edinburgh. A group of us, including my brother, do a session on \u201cDeath as a friend\u201d as part of the Festival of Spirituality, and as we sit in a circle my brother says \u201cThe elixir of immortality is there in the middle of the circle. Who wants a swig?\u201d Everybody declines apart from one woman, who says she \u201cloves life.\u201d Many others object that they too love life but not an infinite amount of it.<\/p>\n

We are repeating a debate that has proceeded for millennia\u2014not that immortality has ever seriously been on offer. Lisl Marburg Goodman, a psychoanalyst, discussed the issue with some 700 creative people, both artists and scientists, and summarises her findings in her book Death and the Creative Life<\/em>. Her theory is that people fear not death but the incomplete life. She urges us to think not of birthdays but of death days, to make more precious our time that remains, and to live a life of \u201cenlightened preparatory grief.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDeath,\u201d she writes, \u201cis the very core of life. It is not only inevitable, not just a consequence of organic processes or the running down of the organic machinery, but an absolute necessity for life. Life is a course and its flow, its one directional pulling force, is death.”<\/p>\n

She is not an enthusiast for immortality and quotes approvingly Lucretius, who wrote \u201cWhy, like a well filled guest, not leave the feast of life?\u201d But some of the creative people she interviewed didn\u2019t agree. Howard Gruber, the psychologist, challenged the assumption that mental potentials are finite and must eventually be exhausted.\u00a0 For him an individual is an open system that can regenerate itself indefinitely. Ira Bernstein, the physicist, and Karl Pribram, psychologist, psychiatrist, and physiologist, agreed.<\/p>\n

Most philosophers and writers are not fans of immortality, but Goethe is one who probably was\u2014and Goodman explores his views. He had a death phobia, and when his wife of three decades was dying he was unable to go into her room. After she died her body was removed immediately, and Goethe did not go to her funeral.<\/p>\n

For Goethe his mission was endless, and so he \u201cdeserved\u201d immortality, although he didn\u2019t believe in the Christian notion of heaven. \u201cI would not know,\u201d he wrote, \u201cwhat to do with eternal blessedness, if it didn\u2019t offer new problems and challenges to conquer. But we only have to look at the planets and the sun, to be reminded that there will be enough \u2018nuts to crack.\u2019\u201d His way to immortality was to pursue the impossible, even if it meant a pact with the devil, the theme of Faust<\/em>.<\/p>\n

On my train journey home now, coming close to Doncaster, my brief intoxication with the thought of immortality is over. I don\u2019t want a pact for the devil, and I don\u2019t want a wifeless immortality reading books and tramping through ever more obscure parts of Britain. Instead I\u2019ll fix on my death day\u201411 March 2032\u2014and continue to love life until then.<\/p>\n

Richard Smith was the editor of the BMJ until 2004 and is director of the United Health Group’s chronic disease initiative.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m sitting in first class on the train to Edinburgh with two glasses of red wine inside me when I look across the water to Lindisfarne and suddenly think \u201cPerhaps […]<\/p>\n

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