The Consolations of Mortality

by Andrew Stark

  All leave their familial and familiar childhood homes for strange new places—thus lending their yearning its fundamentally spatial character—where they then spend the coming years, compounding that spatial longing with a temporal dimension. Such nostalgia-drenched mortal lives, though, can be profoundly livable and fulfilling. They can be endurable and enriching precisely because of that nostalgia, that evocative longing and exquisite yearning, which can mature into great humanity, passion, and art. Why, then, should Jonas think that nostalgia would render immortal life intolerable, and hence worse than the alternative?

  But what if the nostalgia that would grind away at us in immortal life differs from the bittersweet, resonant type that infuses the humanly warm mortal lives of a Nabokov or a Mehta? What if it’s the spatial dimension of their longings, a yearning for a former place—not for a former time—that lends mortal nostalgia whatever deeply redeeming humanity it possesses? If so, then can the purely temporal nostalgia, the nostalgia for an ever-receding past that Jonas envisions for immortals, ever nurture the same redemptive richness?

  Think of the spatial element of nostalgia. Think of the émigré’s pining for home. And think of his feeling like a stranger, even an intruder, in his new land: like a “newcomer, an outsider, the one who did not belong,” as the uprooted Malinalli reflects in Laura Esquivel’s Malinche.7 While the émigré with spatial nostalgia feels like a newcomer, courting resentment from those long-timers who believe that he has invaded their world, the immortal with purely temporal nostalgia undergoes a very different experience. He feels himself to be the long-timer, and it is his world that is being invaded by (as Jonas says) “newcomers who keep arriving”: youngsters with their new music, their new art, their new technology; their new social codes and cues; their new ruthlessness and recklessness.

  So yes, a person with purely temporal nostalgia has traveled far from the olden days for which he yearns, just like the person with spatial nostalgia has traveled far from the old country for which he pines. But instead of feeling like an arriviste in the new era, the temporal nostalgic is the one who feels besieged by new arrivals. He feels himself not so much an intruder as intruded upon.

  What this means is that while those who are spatially nostalgic might feel unsettled, those who are temporally nostalgic risk becoming unhinged. Certainly it can be disorienting to move to a new land, as the spatial nostalgic has done. But at least he is the one who has done the moving; the spatial world itself remains stationary. Not only that but the old country and the new remain at a fixed, bridgeable distance from each other. This isn’t the case, though, for those who are temporally nostalgic. It’s not they who have moved to a new temporal world. Instead, a “new world is [always] coming quickly” toward them, “a harsh, cruel world” of new ideas and mores and expectations, as Madame observes in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.8 Temporal nostalgics are the ones who are stuck while the world—the world of time, not space—is in dizzying, hurtling, unending motion, driving the old and the new ever further and further away from each other as (assuming immortality) the centuries endlessly mount. Not just disorienting, but dismembering: pulling the self apart.

  But there’s something more. In Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss, Biju, a young man marooned in fast-food jobs around New York City, longs for his west Bengali village. Yet while the spatially nostalgic Biju wishes that he himself as an individual could cross the ocean back to the Bengal, he doesn’t want the entire city of New York to move back with him, rolling across the sea to India.

  Now, though, think of the temporally nostalgic Hans Jonas. His situation is the reverse. What he doesn’t want is to go back in time to the 1920s himself, as an individual. He doesn’t aspire to be younger, to be the child he once was. What he would want is for the current time, itself, to go backward: that the whole present age, its culture and politics, its religion and science, all roll back to the era he loved most, the time of his youth. The only thing that would satisfy his yearning, were it possible, is that styles of music, cinema, dance, clothing, architecture, visual art, literature, and everything else unwind in time from the 1980s and ’90s, in which he spent his later years, to those of the Weimar era. What Jonas would want is a return to a public past time, a past that everyone shared, a past with a different style, feel, sensibility, intelligence, and understanding than the present.

  A spatially imbued nostalgia, by contrast, precludes the need for any such impossibly gargantuan wish. True, a desire to return to the place of our youth may well dovetail with a desire to return to a personal past time, the time one enjoyed—the sounds, the fragrances, the warm embraces—that one experienced there as a child: what Hilton Als, mixing the spatial and the temporal, calls “the old country of childhood.”9 And yes, when spatial nostalgia drives temporal nostalgia along this personal path—when the “longing for home,” as Svetlana Boym puts it, gets “shrunk to the longing for one’s own childhood”10—then that kind of temporal nostalgia can be rich and resonant, redolent with warm glows and wistful glistenings.

  But without spatial longing lending it a personal coloring, temporal nostalgia becomes cold and bereft. When the author Simon Reynolds observes that to “exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world,” he is describing something totally immiserating, because it’s a yearning that can never be requited.11 You can’t go back in time as you can in space. And, unlike the distance back in space, the distance back in time grows greater moment by moment.

  Churchill’s funeral took place at St. Paul’s Cathedral on January 30, 1965. The journalist Bernard Levin, in his history of Britain in the 1960s, describes one of the more memorable photographs taken that day. It featured the eighty-two-year-old former Labour prime minister Clement Attlee—who had defeated Churchill in 1945 only to be defeated in turn by Churchill in 1951—waiting to be picked up following the ceremony. Attlee, Levin writes, “was accommodated on the steps of the cathedral with a simple wooden chair, and sat there, bowed over his stick, remembering.”12

  If immortal life takes the path that Jonas predicts, that image captures those who will have to live it. While the spatially nostalgic émigré is the one who moves to a new world, and in principle can always move back to the old one, the temporally nostalgic immortal keeps getting besieged by new worlds moving at him and pines, in vain, to bring back the old one. And so immortal nostalgia would be far worse than the mortal kind. Hans Jonas’s “nostalgia” consolation for mortality has validity.

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  MAKING THE SUN RUN

  The philosopher Martha Nussbaum finds immortality appealing. “As I imagine successive careers for myself (as a cantor, an actress, a psychoanalyst, a novelist)” over endless time, Nussbaum writes, there’d be sufficient change to stave off boredom. But not so much change that she’d entirely cease to be Martha Nussbaum: that she herself would disappear. “I have no difficulty imagining that I would be recognizably myself in all” these new adventures, Nussbaum writes, since “all these pursuits [would be] done in a Martha-ish way.”1

  I have to wonder, though. If her Martha-ishness means anything, from my sense of Prof. Nussbaum, it’s that she has a distinctive personality rooted in (among other things) a love of the ancient world, of opera, and of the magnificent ruin that is the aging human body, as well as deep allegiances to feminism and social justice. In other words, her Martha-ishness is planted in a very particular set of times, both present and past.

  Meanwhile the successive careers that the world offered her would sooner or later mutate beyond recognition. Cantor, psychoanalyst, actress, and novelist are, as human endeavors, already under siege, at least in their traditional forms, thanks to innovations in religious observance, breakthroughs in pharmaceuticals, developments in computer animation, and upheavals in internet self-publishing. Those pursuits seem unlikely to persist over decades, let alone centuries or millennia, in any form that Nussbaum or the res
t of us can presently foresee or would even recognize.

  So I wonder. Wouldn’t the kind of groundedness in the past, the kind of Martha-ishness necessary to keep Nussbaum the same person over time on the one hand, and the kind of changes the world would throw at her so that she could evade boredom on the other hand, not conspire to make her feel increasingly, interminably nostalgic as centuries and millennia passed? Like Hans Jonas’s stranger in an ever stranger land?

  Or look at it this way: sure, from any one decade to the next, continuity in memory, feelings, beliefs, habits, characteristics, aspirations and desires—my Andrew-ishness, if I can borrow from Nussbaum—might make for a persisting self, thus warding off self-alienation. But as those decades ceaselessly pile up, and one decade of the same memories, feelings, beliefs, habits, characteristics, aspirations, and desires gets added on top of the previous ones ad infinitum, that continuity would become a recipe for paralytic boredom.

  And sure, from any one decade to the next, a change in career might ward off boredom. But as those decades endlessly pile up, and one change compounds the previous one, which compounded the previous one, and so forth, such changes would, in toto, become a road map to the death of previous selves, to profound self-alienation.

  Boredom, self-alienation, and nostalgia each have their mortal equivalents. And some of those mortal versions can be livable, perhaps tolerable, possibly even valuable, or at least preferable to death. We should be under no illusions, though—as I have tried to suggest—that their immortal variants would be so benign.

  But something in me, perhaps in you too, rebels at these dire prognoses. Is there no “play in the joints” here, no immortal path that can somehow slip betwixt and between these grim scenarios? In pursuing this question, we will necessarily encounter some of the more fantastic and speculative projections for immortality that mortal minds have generated.

  They Can’t Take That Away from You—But on the Other Hand, You Can’t Take It with You

  Think of a stereotypical view—and for simplicity’s sake, I take as an example a stereotypical adolescent male heterosexual view although it can easily be adapted for any set of preferences—of what a blissful immortality might look like. You’re in love with Barbara Ann. But you’re also intrigued by Betty Lou, Peggy Sue, Mary Lou, and countless others. If you were immortal, you could regularly delight in Barbara Ann’s company over the course of thousands of millennia, while enjoying short affairs with Betty, Peggy, Mary, and the unending others who catch your eye. You wouldn’t get nostalgic about Barbara Ann because you’d always be able to spend time with her—she’s not going anywhere. But you wouldn’t get bored either, because there are so many alternatives. Nor would you become self-alienated, an aimless drifter: your innumerable encounters with Barbara Ann would maintain a heft, a continuity, a mooring of deep intimacy in your romantic life throughout all the exciting changes it undergoes—forever.

  You can substitute men, careers, hobbies, food, drink, mystical experiences, voyages to different galaxies, or anything else you like for Barbara Ann and company. Immortality seems just fine.

  But there’s another way of looking at it.

  Unless you are Mick Jagger, you will know how many lovers you have had. But unless you are Miles Monroe, Woody Allen’s character from the movie Sleeper—“Sex and death: two things that come once in a lifetime”—you will not know how many times you’ve made love. You will know how many lovers you’ve had because in counting them, you—as we all do when we tote up different kinds of notches on our belt—treat your partners as objects to be accumulated. You won’t know how many times you’ve made love, though, because you treat those moments not as objects but as the experiences they are, enjoying them as they happen and then letting them slip through your fingers back into the past.

  That’s not set in stone. Fiction and real life furnish instances of people who add up and record in their diaries as if they were objects to be stockpiled, with commentary on each episode, their individual sexual experiences.2 The good things in life, many of them, lend themselves to being treated either as objects or as experiences; within bounds the choice is yours.

  But here’s the rub: it would seem as if immortality looks more appealing to the extent that we think of its contents as objects, not experiences. If you are bored with an object (Mary Lou, Peggy Sue, Betty Lou), you can always give it up or slip away from it. If you are feeling nostalgic for an object (Barbara Ann) you can always go and visit it, or simply keep it perpetually with you. And no need to worry about self-alienation. You can always seek out new objects (Mary, Peggy, Betty) while keeping the old—Barbara Ann, that continuing touchstone in your life—close at hand. If we imagine an immortal paradise, this is likely be our implicit model, and whatever we view as an object will qualify.

  But experiences? Here are three lessons, drawn from the master, Proust, about experiences. First, you can’t take them with you the way you can an object. As soon as they happen they begin falling back in time as you forge ahead. Maybe you can always go and revisit Barbara Ann the person. But you can’t revive Barbara Ann the experience. You can’t keep that with you to revel in at will. Over time, she will have changed, as will you. Nostalgia seems foreordained.3

  Second, while you can’t take an experience with you, in another sense no one can take an experience away from you. Those moments you had with Mary Lou or Peggy Sue or Betty Lou? Once having happened they can’t unhappen. You can’t cleanse your own personal past of an experience that no longer pleases you, in the way that you can clear your own personal space of an object that no longer delights you. Nor can you speed through time away from an experience as soon as it becomes tiresome, in the way that you can speed through space away from an object as soon as it becomes irksome. Your encounter with any new Mary, or Peggy, or Betty will inevitably unfold under a shadow: a shadow cast by the doldrums in which all the previous ones—no matter how exciting they were to begin with—ultimately ended. Boredom, sooner or later, seems foreordained.4

  And finally, not being tangible in the way that objects are, experiences blur into each other. Even though you’ve had innumerable passionate embraces with Barbara Ann, that central thread in your life who keeps you the same person, only a handful will ever remain in your mind as significant. Perhaps they will meld into just one composite, blurred, and fragmentary memory. For that reason, accumulating experiences will always seem more pointless than accumulating objects. All the moments you spent with Barbara Ann will begin collapsing into themselves. Over a long enough time, they will scarcely have the heft to provide the backbone for an ongoing sense of self. Over a long enough time, self-alienation always threatens.5

  Certainly, if immortality meant moving through endless space instead of through endless time, then our capacities to retain, scrap, or accumulate objects at will might legitimately be the dominant template in our psychology. But immortality doesn’t mean moving in endless space with respect to objects. It means moving in endless time with respect to experiences. Treating irretrievable experiences as if we could retain them like objects, or irreversible experiences as if we could scrap them like objects, or blurry experiences as if we could accumulate them like objects, will be less and less possible as time passes. And unfortunately their irretrievability guarantees nostalgia. Their irreversibility augurs boredom. Their blurriness portends self-alienation. In the end the “Barbara Ann” scenario fails to bar nostalgia, boredom, and self-alienation from awaiting us as different versions of our immortal fate.

  Robert Ettinger, the mind behind the cryonics movement, seems to me to have bought into the Barbara Ann scenario. Cryonics technology enables us to have our head or entire body frozen just before or after death, on the assumption that in the centuries ahead, when medical science is able to cure the disease to which we succumbed, someone will thaw us out and we will resume living. Perhaps we will even live forever, if the thawing takes place at a time when humankind has discovered the secret to immortality. Paradise aw
aits.

  I say, though, that Ettinger bought into the Barbara Ann scenario because, in addition to having had himself frozen when he died in 2011, he had previously frozen both of the two wives he outlived. He intended them all to be defrosted when the time came. For Ettinger, it would seem, his two wives weren’t experiences that, as he looked forward to an immortal future, he was willing to let drift back into the past. They were objects to be accumulated.

  I foresee trouble in paradise.

  Slow It Down

  Here’s another scenario for a possibly blissful immortality. Most of us, over the course of our mortal lives, gradually forget most of our memories and replace many of our desires: we exchange the memories and desires of our childhood for those of adolescence, then adulthood, then old age. Shedding our memories and shifting our desires help keep the world fresh and so allow us to dodge overwhelming boredom. Acquiring new memories and developing new desires also enable us to stay engaged in the present and so evade crushing nostalgia for earlier times. But we never overhaul our memories or our desires so completely that we lose the thread of our self and become someone else entirely. We somehow manage to elude recurrent self-alienation.

  What’s more, most of us face a future whose events contain enough novelty to allow us to cheat boredom. But those events are rarely so wholly unprecedented that we risk becoming anachronisms in our own lifetime, hence suffering debilitating nostalgia. Nor are they so wholly unprecedented that we risk becoming strangers to our former selves, hence undergoing rupturing self-alienation. Most of us, then, over the course of our mortal life become neither cripplingly bored nor desperately nostalgic nor deeply self-alienated. Why couldn’t immortal life be like that?

  Perhaps it could. But for a life that lasted eons to stand a chance of unfolding in such a fashion, everything would have to scale up accordingly.