The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief, and Magic Behind Living Forever

416 Pages·2013·1.84 MB·English

by  Adam Leith Gollner

ALSO BY ADAM LEITH GOLLNER
The Fruit Hunters:
A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession

Copyright © 2013 9165-2610 Quebec, Inc.
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Library and Archives of Canada Cataloguing in Publication is available upon request eISBN: 978-
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v3.1
To my mother and father
Host of the 1994 Miss USA competition, to Miss Alabama: “If you
could live forever, would you want to, and why?”
Miss Alabama: “I would not live forever, because we should not
live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we
would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I
would not live forever.”
I haven’t any clear idea what I’m saying when I’m saying “I don’t
cease to exist.” … If you say to me—“Do you cease to exist?”—I
should be bewildered, and would not know what exactly this is to
mean … and this is all there is to it—except further muddles.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures on Religious Belief
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: On Finitude and Infinity
Introduction: The Nature of Immortality
Part 1: Belief
1 We Bereave, We Believe
2 Journey into Remoteness
3 The Valley of Astonishment
4 Lessons of the Teachings
5 To Sea and Hear
6 Beneath the Gaze of Eternity
7 Technical Interlude: Writ in Water
8 The Magical Fountain
9 Letters upon Letters: Dividing the Invisible
10 Almost Real
11 Let’s Run into the Waves and Spring Back to Life
Part 2: Magic
12 Mystifier
13 Escapology
14 The Sorcerer’s Lair
15 Sleights of Mind
16 Technical Interlude: Magick, Eros, Symbolism
17 Transmuting Magic into Science
Part 3: Science
18 Mercurial Times
19 Preservation’s Particulars: Longevity and Longing
20 Biological Calculus
21 It Was the Future
22 Refrigerator Heaven
23 Secret Santa Barbara
24 The Harvard Symposium
Conclusion: If _____ Is Possible
Epilogue: Springs Eternal
Acknowledgments
Sources
About the Author
Prologue
On Finitude and Infinity
The only secret people keep Is Immortality.
—Emily Dickinson, poem number 1748
My dear colleagues: good bad, religion poetry, spirit skepticism,
definition definition,
that’s why you’re all going to die,
and you will die, I promise you.
The great mystery is a secret, but it’s known to a few people.
—Tristan Tzara, Seven Dada Manifestos
W ’ . Humans have always believed in
E RE FOREVER DREAMERS
immortality. In search of longevity, if not eternal youth, we’ve tried
elixirs, hormones, prayers, pills, spells, stem cells. The Hungarian
countess Erzsébet Báthory bathed in the blood of murdered virgins.
Throughout the Middle Ages, old men tried to hot-wire faded energy
levels with veinloads of fresh blood, often resulting in gruesome
transfusion mishaps (as when three boys died draining themselves for
Pope Innocent VIII). Seventeenth-century Englishmen guzzled buzzard
stones and pulverized boar pizzles hoping to solve the puzzle of aging. In
the 1960s, booster shots of fetal lamb cells became a trend, with Swiss
tissue clinicians administering embryonic injections to the likes of Noël
Coward and Somerset Maugham. Modern-day gene-regenerating creams
are made with baby human foreskin fibroblasts. Some Jamaican men
still grate dried tortoise scrotum into bowls of soup as an antiaging
tactic. If it won’t bestow never-ending life, at the very least, they tell
each other (and curious reporters), it’s like Parmesan for the erectile
soul.
Where haven’t we gone? Elderly and hopeful we’ve traveled to
backwater Romania for procaine hydrochloride treatments of Gerovital-
H3, to Tibet in pursuit of pure lama urine, to the South Pacific seeking
rainwater cures. In the 1990s, the abundance of centenarians in the
Caucasus region led to speculation that kefir extends life; but in 1998, a
121-year-old Azerbaijani divulged his secret to investigators: he never ate
yogurt. We don’t care; just tell us again and again that there are hot
spots, hidden valleys, and other blue zones where people live
extraordinarily long, fulfilled lives. And then sell us ways of
incorporating their secrets into our daily grind so that we, too, can hum
forever.
How confused can we get? Immortality is as oxymoronic and
straightforward as surviving death. After all, doesn’t radical life
extension just lead to eternal life? Heaven’s Gaters convinced themselves
they could reach the comet of paradise through cyanide-laced
applesauce. The poet Charles Baudelaire’s suicide note (from a failed
1845 attempt) explained, “I’m killing myself because I believe I am
immortal.” The pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles leapt into an active
volcano to prove that immortality is real. He was never seen again, but
his name lives on in perpetuity. Eternal life is twisted like that, a molten
knot, a Möbius striptease, a pretzel made of mirrors.
We die to live forever; and we use immortality to keep dead people
alive. Decades after their deaths, the preserved bodies of Chairman Mao,
Ho Chi Minh, and Lenin remain on public view. “Lenin, even now, is
more alive than all the living,” declared Vladimir Mayakovsky, at the
great leader’s funeral. “Lenin’s death is not death,” clarified the
suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich. “He is alive and eternal.”
How weird have we been? In our desperation, we’ve eaten Egyptian
mummies. Entwined and embalmed, preserved for millennia, they
seemed connected to the beyond. For hundreds of years, until World War
II, scraps and powders of shredded or ground mummified corpses were