Immortality (34 page)

Some Gaia supporters, however, believe that, like all organisms, earth will reproduce, and we humans, with our aspirations to travel into space and colonize new planets, are the means—we are Gaia’s spores. This is an imaginative response to the challenge of a doomed earth, and perhaps, if we have not already destroyed ourselves by then, we will one day have the technology to start anew in different solar systems or faraway galaxies.

But it seems that we cannot keep running forever: the majority of cosmologists believe that the entire universe will one day end. They disagree on how; current theories include a Big Freeze (wherein energy spreads out until the universe is effectively empty with a temperature so close to absolute zero that nothing can happen anymore), a Big Rip (all matter eventually being torn apart into fundamental particles) or a Big Crunch (the universe collapsing in on itself). Whichever of these theories proves to be closest to the truth, it does not look good for our prospects of being at home in the cosmos forever.

Fortunately, all these scenarios are a very long way away. And they may all be wrong. For now, all we can say is that the universe, life, and certainly human science are still young. Perhaps one day we—or some far more evolved successor—will be able to seed new universes that are fit for life. Indeed, perhaps we are already in one, seeded by some earlier civilization.

T
HE
Legacy Narrative in both its forms is a hugely productive force. The impulse to produce something of us that will live on beyond the individual body drives us to heroic deeds and high art, and to care for our families, tribes, nations or all of life. And of course each one of us
is
the product of two people’s attempt to create something that will live on after their own bodies have failed.

But we have also seen that it can quickly turn into a darker force too. Olympias, for example, in her desire to secure the position of her grandson, Alexander IV, was happy to continue the killing practiced on such a grand scale by the little boy’s great father. When she established herself as regent in Macedon, she tore into the heart of the country’s elite, torturing, imprisoning and killing those who she believed opposed her. But in doing so she turned the people against her, and when the son of one of Alexander’s generals raised another army, he found it easy to win support among the Macedonian nobility. Olympias was quickly defeated, tried and condemned to death.

For all her failings and transgressions, ancient reports are in agreement that Olympias faced her death with courage and composure. One report says that she went out to meet her executioners so boldly that they could not bring themselves to do their duty and others had to be sent for, another that she was in the end stoned by the relatives of those whom she had herself killed. Perhaps she believed that she had already done enough to pave the way for her grandson
to one day take the throne for himself alone. But it was not to be: once the new regime was well entrenched, the boy-king Alexander IV was quietly done away with. After all the bloodshed across three continents, Olympias’s dynasty was finished.

Nowadays we know that the genetic difference between Olympias’s direct descendants and any other Macedonian—indeed any other human being—would be minuscule. If the biological immortality narrative has any plausibility at all, then it is not in promoting your own offspring at the expense of others, but rather in identifying as broadly as possible with the wider community—whether of humanity or even of all living things. But as with the cultural half of the Legacy Narrative, this plausibility is limited: there are many benefits to identifying widely with our fellow creatures, but eternal life is not one of them.

Which means all four fundamental immortality narratives are illusions. None of them will enable us to live forever. Yet we have seen that they serve both to fuel human progress and to protect us from a crippling fear of death. The question therefore becomes whether we can live without them. I believe we can, and as my witness I call a king whose epic adventure was recorded at the very beginnings of civilization: Gilgamesh.

A
MAN
walked into a bar. He looked haggard, tired, like he had been sleeping rough, his face raw from the wind and the sun. A hunter, perhaps, thought the barmaid—one of the rugged types who were among the few to make it out to this remote inn. But then something in his manner told her he was—or had been—more than just a woodsman. Either way, he looked like he badly needed a drink.

“What’s up, stranger?” she asked, handing him a beer. He took a sip, then looked up and told his story.

“I was a king,” he said. She raised her eyebrows. “And the strongest in my land. But I was an idiot, full of myself, bullying my people and beating my chest. So the gods created a wild man who would be my match. Enkidu, he was called. He came into my city and challenged me—we wrestled until the foundations shook, until we both knew the match was too even and neither of us could win. Then we embraced and became the best of friends. Together we slew Humbaba, the ogre who guarded the Forest of Cedar, and killed the lions in the mountain passes.”

Still polishing earthenware cups, the barmaid asked, “Well, if you are a king, then why do you wander the wild? If you are the one who killed Humbaba, why do you now have sunken cheeks and wear a hunter’s garb?”

“Why? I’ll tell you. Because Enkidu and I slew the Bull of Heaven, sent by Ishtar to lay waste to the land, and that, for the gods, was too much. They decreed that one of us must die. Enkidu went down with a fever; twelve days he lay sick; then on the twelfth he passed into the land from which none return.

“My friend! Like a panther, he was. I loved him so much; together we went through every danger. For a week, I wept over his body and would not allow it to be taken, hoping he might rise again, until a maggot dropped from his nostril and I knew Death had taken him.

“But that is not the worst of it—it was then that I saw: I too would one day be like him. If Death can claim Enkidu, strongest of the strong, then why not also a king? One day, I too will fall, never to rise again. It is too much to bear! I can look any man in the face, but not Death! And so, since I buried my friend, I have wandered the wilds, living on the flesh of beasts. I seek the one who survived the flood, Utnapishtim, the one they say is immortal, that I might learn his secret. Tell me, where can I find him?”

“Then you must be Gilgamesh,” replied the barmaid. “But don’t you see, immortality is not for the likes of us.

Gilgamesh looked the barmaid in the eye. “Just tell me where I can find Utnapishtim.”

“You must pay the boatman to take you across the Waters of Death,” she replied. And with that, he paid up and left.

I
T
was 2700
BCE
and civilization was young when Gilgamesh left the tavern at the end of the world and persuaded the mysterious boatman to take him to Utnapishtim. He had wandered far from his kingdom of Uruk in the fertile lands between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, close to Babylon and modern-day Baghdad. According to the records of the Sumerian people who lived in this region, Gilgamesh was a historical figure—though one whose deeds had become legend.

Across the Waters of Death, the wandering king found the only immortal, Utnapishtim. The old man explained that he and his wife alone had been permitted to live forever—this was their reward for having built the ark and saved life on earth from the Deluge. This great flood had been sent to destroy a humanity that was overrunning the land; in order to prevent them from once again reaching such numbers, the gods then decreed that all subsequent humans were to be mortal.

The wise old man then challenged Gilgamesh: if he wanted to defeat Death so much, first he should show that he could defeat its little brother: Sleep. He had only to go without slumber for seven nights. Of course Gilgamesh, exhausted from his travels, failed. “See the fellow who so desired life!” said Utnapishtim mockingly. “Sleep like a fog already breathes over him!”

Echoing the advice of the barmaid, Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh to clean himself up, go home and start acting like a proper king. Then, in a last aside, he revealed to him the existence of an underwater plant that could turn back aging. Immediately, the hero dived into the ocean and plucked the magic herb, determined to bring it back to Uruk. This turned out, however, only to be the final taunt at his aspirations—on his journey home, when the hero was bathing, a snake stole the plant and bore it off, shedding its skin as it went. Weeping, Gilgamesh finally accepted that eternal life would never be his.

W
HICH
is the position in which we too find ourselves. We have now examined all four immortality narratives and seen that none of them has a credible chance of delivering on its promise. Despite their ancient histories, millions of followers and enormous influence in shaping human civilization, the four paths all fall far short of the summit. Eternal life will never be ours.

This leaves us in something of a fix. We saw at the very beginning of this book that we all have the instinct to perpetuate ourselves indefinitely into the future—the will to immortality. And we saw that the flip side of this is an inborn fear of death. The four paths serve to reassure us that the will to immortality will be satisfied, and so the fear is assuaged. For thousands of years and across the globe they have served as lullabies to soothe our existential angst. What does it mean for us if they are all illusions? Must we, like Gilgamesh, wander the desert weeping?

Many have thought so. St. Paul, who did so much to encourage hope in the hereafter, was one: “If
in this life only
we have hope in Christ, we of all men are most miserable,” he wrote (1 Corinthians 15:19, emphasis added). Plenty of scholars, priests and poets since have agreed that a finite life cannot be a good life; so illustrious a philosopher as Immanuel Kant argued that neither happiness nor ethics
was possible without an unending hereafter. The prospect of death’s finality makes all our projects seem futile and fills us with dread.

To create such a wonderful creature as a human being only to permit him or her to turn to dust seems indeed an extraordinary waste, a cruel, cosmic joke at our expense. As Alfred, Lord Tennyson, put it, “If immortality be not true, then no God but a mocking fiend created us.” (Rather petulantly adding, “If there is no immortality, I shall hurl myself into the sea!”) More recently, the psychologists behind Terror Management Theory suggested that without our comforting illusions, we will become “twitching blobs of biological protoplasm completely perfused with anxiety.”

The Mortality Paradox only worsens the situation, as we saw in
chapter 1
. The truth of the first part, that we must die like all other living things, goes unmitigated, while the second part, that we cannot imagine our own nonexistence, plays terrible tricks on us. We have seen that this intuition can serve as a scaffold on which immortality narratives can be built, with their promises of a happy afterlife among friends and angels. But if we have dismissed the immortality narratives, then we are deprived of such positive pictures—yet this does not make it any the easier to grasp the prospect of not being. And so we fill the imaginative void with nightmares. In the absence of a positive image of eternity, we cannot help but imagine death to be endless gloom, an eternal exile in the abyss—the House of Darkness feared by the ancients.