Book of Immortality

by Adam Leith Gollner

  The Tessler Agency played a key role in the story of how this book became a book. I’m thrilled to now be working with Tracy Bohan of the Wylie Agency.

  My eternal gratitude to everyone at Scribner, especially Nan Graham, Susan Moldow, Kelsey Smith, Leah Sikora, and Paul Whitlatch. I’m indebted to Steve Boldt for his excellent copyediting work, and to Dan Cuddy and the entire production team. My editor and copilot, Alexis Gargagliano, encouraged me to go deeper and never wavered in her faith, patience, and understanding. Thank you, Alexis, for guiding me, for collaborating with me, for being so generous and so brilliant.

  Much thanks to the fantastic team at Doubleday/Random House Canada: Lynn Henry, Amy Black, Kristin Cochrane, Christopher Frey, and Adria Iwasutiak.

  Loving thanks to Annie Briard, David Gawley, Kicsi Néni, Kati Néni, Antal, Ricsi, Zsuzsi, Paul, Peter, Brian, Mandy, Ian, Sheelagh, Willie, Sam, and Laura.

  Thank you to the incomparable Liane Balaban for the wisdom, poetry, and inspiration: “Toujours nous irons plus loin sans avancer jamais.”

  To Natasha Li Pickowicz, thank you for being in the life force with me. You know more than anyone what this entailed.

  My deepest thanks to my family—my brothers, Miska and Julian, my father, András, and my mother, Linda.

  About the Author

  JASON SANCHEZ

  Adam Leith Gollner is the author of The Fruit Hunters. The former editor of Vice magazine, he has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Globe and Mail, and Lucky Peach. He lives in Montreal.

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  ALSO BY ADAM LEITH GOLLNER

  The Fruit Hunters:

  A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession

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  Sources

  Est enim benignum (ut arbitror) et plenum ingenui pudoris, fateri per quos profeceris.

  —Pliny, Naturalis Historia

  EVERYTHING IN THIS book actually happened or can be traced back to verifiable sources. The people, the places, the events, the ideas, the dreams: all are real. The sequence has been modified for narrative flow and structural continuity. Innumerable documents informed my research; those to whom I am most indebted are listed below. This is not intended as a work of academic scholarship; it is beholden only “to the sacred majesty of Truth.” In that aim, I invite anyone curious about the derivation of a certain fact or passage to contact me (through adamgollner.com) should clarification be desired. Corrections, as well, are welcome; I alone assume responsibility for any errors or misinterpretations in the text. My thanks to all the authors listed below.

  General Sources

  Karen Armstrong, In the Beginning; A Short History of Myth

  Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead

  W. H. Auden, The Sea and the Mirror

  Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World

  Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

  Graham Bell, Sex and Death in Protozoa

  Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company

  Lucian Boia, Forever Young

  Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions; Selected Non-Fictions; History of Eternity

  John Burrow, A History of Histories

  J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress

  Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

  Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

  Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape

  Lorraine J. Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity

  Lorraine J. Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750

  John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty

  Annie Dillard, For the Time Being

  Wendy Doniger, The Implied Spider; Other Peoples’ Myths; Tales of Sex and Violence; The Hindus: An Alternative History

  David Eagleman, Incognito

  Mircea Eliade, Myths, Rites, Symbols; Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return

  J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough; The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion; The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust 1 and 2, tr. David Luke

  Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life

  John Gray, Black Mass; The Immortalization Commission

  Béla Hamvas, The Philosophy of Wine

  Thierry Hentsch, Truth or Death: The Quest for Immortality in the Western Narrative Tradition, tr. Fred A. Reed

  Heraclitus, Fragments

  William James, Human Immortality; The Will to Believe; The Varieties of Religious Experience

  Carl Gustav Jung, The Collected Works

  Károly Kerényi, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life; Asklepios: Archetypal Image of the Physician’s Existence; Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter

  Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

  Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

  Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Essays

  S. Jay Olshansky and Bruce A. Carnes, The Quest for Immortality: Science at the Frontiers of Aging

  Parmenides, On Nature

  Adam Phillips, Houdini’s Box; Terrors and Experts; On Balance; Side Effects

  Plato, Symposium; Phaedrus; Phaedo; Republic; Euthyphro; Parmenides

  Porphyry of Tyre, On the Cave of the Nymphs

  Robert Prehoda, Extended Youth

  Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition

  Mary Roach, Spook; Stiff; Bonk

  Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

  José Saramago, Death with Interruptions

  Susan Sontag, Reborn

  Enid Starkie, Baudelaire

  Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

  William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light

  Ivan Turgenev, A Sportsman’s Sketches

  Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism

  Eliot Weinberger, An Elemental Thing

  Oscar Wilde, The Truth of Masks

  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief

  William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

  Introduction

  Simon Blackburn, Truth: A Guide

  Eugene Fontinell, Self, God, and Immortality

  John A. Mann, Secrets of Life Extension

  Albert Rosenfeld, Prolongevity

  Edith Sitwell, The English Eccentrics

  Lyall Watson, The Romeo Error

  Belief, Grief

  Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

  Ronald Britton, Belief and Imagination

  Robert Buckman, Can We Be Good Without God?

  Alex Comfort, The Process of Ageing

  E. M. Forster, Howards End

  John Hick, Death and Eternal Life

  Howard I. Kushner, Self-Destruction in the Promised Land

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

  Meghan O’Rourke, “Good Grief,” The New Yorker, February 1, 2010

  Michael Shermer, The Believing Brain

  Islam and Judaism

  The Zohar

  The Torah

  Farīd al-Dīn Attar, The Conference of the Birds

  Rav Berg, Immortality

  O. M. Burke, Among the Dervishes

  Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

  Mahmud Shabistari, The Secret Rose Garden

  Idries Shah, The Sufis

  Christianity and the Life Force

  Aristotle, De Anima

  Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution; The Creative Mind; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion

/>   Marc Gervais, Ingmar Bergman: Magician and Prophet

  Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises

  Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

  Plotinus, Collected Works

  George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah; Saint Joan; Man and Superman; essays and lectures on the life force

  W. S. Smith, Bishop of Everywhere: Bernard Shaw and the Life Force

  Water

  Apuleius, Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass)

  Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey; The Night Country

  Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins of European Thought

  Walter F. Otto, Dionysus, Myth and Cult, tr. Robert B. Palmer

  G. Cope Schellhorn, Man’s Quest for Immortality, from Ancient Times to the Present

  Eric Trimmer, Rejuvenation

  The Fountain of Youth

  Pseudo-Callisthenes, The Alexander Romance

  Luella Day, Tragedy of the Klondike

  Gerald Gruman, A History of Ideas About the Prolongation of Life

  E. W. Hopkins, “The Fountain of Youth,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1905

  Jill Lepore, “Just the Facts, Ma’am,” The New Yorker, March 24, 2008

  Lael Morgan, Good Time Girls of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush

  Leonardo Olschki, “Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth: History of a Geographical Myth,” Hispanic American Historical Review, August 1941

  Richard Stoneman, Alexander the Great: A Life in Legend

  Aleksandra Szalc, In Search of Water of Life: Alexander Romance and Indian Mythology

  Various documents from the St. Augustine Historical Society

  Esalen

  Burkhard Bilger, “The Possibilian,” The New Yorker, April 25, 2011

  Robert Bly, Iron John

  Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart

  Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion

  Michael Meade, The Water of Life

  Géza Róheim, The Eternal Ones of the Dream; Animism, Magic, and the Divine King; The Gates of the Dream

  Rudolf Steiner, First Steps in Inner Development

  William Irwin Thompson, At the Edge of History

  Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage”

  Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage

  Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

  Magic

  Paul Christian, The History and Practice of Magic

  David Copperfield, Tales of the Impossible; Beyond Imagination

  Simon During, Modern Enchantments

  Erik Hornung, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt

  Walter Kaufmann and Forrest E. Baird, Ancient Philosophy

  Eliphas Lévi, The History of Magic; Transcendental Magic

  Thomas Mann, Mario and the Magician

  Karol Myśliwiec, Eros on the Nile

  David Silverman, Leonard H. Lesko, John Baines, and Byron E. Shafer, Religion in Ancient Egypt

  Bill Zehme, Intimate Strangers

  Eros and Symbolism

  Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

  J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual

  Sándor Ferenczi, Thalassa

  Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

  Melanie Klein, “The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1930

  Hanna Segal, “Notes on Symbol Formation,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1957

  August Strindberg, A Dream Play

  Emanuel Swedenborg, Arcana Cœlestia

  Alchemy

  Obed Simon Johnson, A Study of Chinese Alchemy

  Carl Gustav Jung, Alchemical Studies

  Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China

  Edward H. Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand

  Eliot Weinberger, “China’s Golden Age,” New York Review of Books, November 6, 2008

  David Gordon White, The Alchemical Body

  Douglas Wile, Art of the Bedchamber

  Antiaging Science

  Marcia Angell, “Big Pharma, Bad Medicine: How Corporate Dollars Corrupt Research and Education,” Boston Review, May/June 2010

  Leonard Guarente, Ageless Quest

  Stephen S. Hall, Merchants of Immortality

  Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

  David A. Sinclair and Leonard Guarente, “Unlocking the Secrets of Longevity Genes,” Scientific American, February 20, 2006

  Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

  Lewis D. Solomon, The Quest for Human Longevity

  Judith Thurman, “Face It,” The New Yorker, March 29, 2010

  Nicholas Wade, Numerous articles on antiaging in the New York Times

  Duff Wilson, “Harvard Medical School in Ethics Quandary,” New York Times, March 2, 2009

  Keith J. Winstein, “Harvard Anti-Aging Researcher Quits Shaklee Advisory Board,” Wall Street Journal, December 26, 2008

  Radical Life Extension

  Anonymous, “Strength from Within,” Life Extension magazine, April 2002

  Various authors, The Scientific Conquest of Death: Essays on Infinite Lifespans

  Aubrey de Grey, Ending Aging

  David Hamilton, The Monkey Gland Affair

  Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines; The Singularity Is Near

  Nathaniel Rich, “Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?” New York Times Magazine, November 28, 2012

  Jonathan Weiner, Long for This World

  Cryonics

  Mike Darwin, Cryonics: An Historical Failure Analysis

  Nathan Duhring, Immortality: Scientifically, Physically, Now

  Robert Ettinger, The Prospect of Immortality; YOUNIVERSE: Toward a Self-Centered Philosophy

  Jill Lepore, The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death

  Robert F. Nelson, We Froze the First Man

  Conclusion

  Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years

  Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom

  F. M. Esfandiary, Up-Wingers

  David M. Friedman, The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever

  Peter Kingsley, Reality

  Jill Lepore, “It’s Spreading,” The New Yorker, June 1, 2009

  Proclus, A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements

  Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, Turning the Mind into an Ally; Ruling Your World; “The Elixir of Life Ceremony” handout

  Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Crazy Wisdom

  Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger

  Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

  Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

  Index

  Abolish Death Committee, 355–56

  aboriginal peoples, 154

  acharyas, 38

  achievement immortality, 29

  Adams, Henry, 58

  Aeneas, 18

  Aeschylus, 212

  age-I longevity gene, 255, 260

  Ageless Living (Vital), 324–25

  Ageless Quest (Guarente), 334, 335

  agnosticism, 13

  Ai of Jin, Emperor, 238

  AIDS, 272, 276

  Akshobhya, 368–69

  alchemy, 10, 17, 225, 226, 228–31, 238–39, 241–46, 245n, 322

  Alcor, 305–06, 307n, 308, 309n, 311, 315

  Alcor Society for Solid State Hypothermia, 305n

  Aleutian islanders, 100

  Alexander Romance, The, 121–22, 122n

  Alexander the Great, 19, 117, 121–22

  Alexander III, Pope, 114, 115

  Al-Ghazali, 51

  Ali, Muhammad, 306

  Al Sunnah Al Nabawiah Mosque, Montreal, 48–49, 48n

  Alzheimer’s, 61, 66, 258, 272, 302

  American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M), 253

  American Medical Student A
ssociation, 343

  Ames, Bruce, 254

  Amgen, 341

  amrita, 100, 212

  Anaximander, 181

  ancient Greece, 42, 54, 100–101, 120–21, 154, 155, 161, 181, 213, 214, 217–18, 226n, 231–32, 357, 371–73, 376

  ancient Egypt, 2–3, 38n, 112, 115, 144, 179–80, 181, 192, 226n, 231–32, 276

  ancient Rome, 16, 101, 106, 116, 357

  Andregg, William, 16

  Andrews, Bill, 284–85

  Angel, Criss, 110, 182

  Angell, Marcia, 343

  angels, 86, 90, 216

  Anqi Sheng, 242

  antagonistic pleiotropy, 258

  anthropology, 103, 104–05, 161

  Antiaging Products Pose Potential for Physical and Economic Harm (Special Committee on Aging), 251

  antiaging remedies, 2, 4, 9, 171, 208, 244–45, 251–53, 264–65, 275, 285, 297, 318–20, 335, 341, 349

  antiwrinkle creams, 288

  Āpastamba, Dharmasutra of, 31

  apparition chamber, 41–42

  Apollo, 378

  aquaster, 232

  Arabian Nights, The, 122

  Arakawa, Shusaku, 266

  Aristophanes, 114

  Aristotle, 372

  Armida (Rossini), 113

  Armstrong, Neil, 354

  Artaud, Antonin, 281

  Arthurian literature, 118

  Ashburner, Michael, 265

  Asimov, Isaac, 307

  Asklepios, 101, 105

  associative thinking, 103

  Atala, Anthony, 249

  atheism and atheists, 12–13, 20, 66, 358–59, 360, 363

  Attar, Farīd al-Dīn, 52, 117

  Atum, 180

  Atwood, Margaret, 18

  Auden, W. H., 25, 167, 224

  Augustus, emperor, 16

  Aula Lucis (Vaughan), 215