“And therefore I have sailed the seas and come/To the holy city of Byzantium.”—Yeats
“Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought/As doth eternity.”—Keats
“The Tao is infinite, eternal.
Why is it eternal?
It was never born;
thus it can never die.
Why is it infinite?
It has no desires for itself;
thus it is present for all beings.”—Tao the Ching, 7
“O who could have foretold that the heart grows old?”—Yeats
“No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.”—Borges
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”—Eliot
First of all, the only life we know of is physical life on this earth. The idea of an afterlife is an inevitable human invention, given the nature of our existence: brevity in a context of infinitude, and imperfect justice. Perhaps this situation accounts for the intuition at the heart of all spiritual/religious systems that there is something wrong or corrupted or fallen, or at least misunderstood, about our existence. Or perhaps the intuition dates only from the onset of mass socialization. At any rate, since I have no information about life apart from this life, I can only cite my intuition that what the Greeks called psyche, the Hindus atman, returns to its natural re-integration with what the Greeks called theos and the Hindus brahman, at the time of physical death. Philo of Alexandria, the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher whose lifetime encompassed that of Jesus, when Alexandria was a multi-cultural Hellenistic city in the Roman province of Egypt, draws on the Torah: “When the soul has departed from this house and has resettled elsewhere, all that is left behind is defiled, in that it now lacks the image of God.”
When I say “eternal life,” I don’t mean the persistence of consciousness—another subject altogether—but the general conception I see and hear around me of some kind of continuation of earthly life, either within this life or beyond it—or, more morbidly, the early Judaic and Christian idea of bodily resurrection.
Everything living in its prime resists death, because all stories long for their resolution, but I can think of perpetuating this life beyond its natural scope as nothing but horrifying.
The nightmare of the individual organism that cannot die is vivid to anyone who actually contemplates it. So the fact that it is impossible to imagine continuing to be yourself in an eternal state in linear time doesn’t seem to faze some people can only be the result of their not thinking it through. Literature provides examples of authors who have thought it through: Swift in Book 3 of Gulliver’s Travels, where we meet the Struldbrugs, who are immortal but continue aging, a fate certainly worse than death. Or Tithonus, a Trojan prince whose lover, the water nymph Eos, asked Zeus to grant Tithonus immortality but forgot to ask him for eternal youth. Tithonus, of course, shrinks into an insect-like consciousness that can’t die, as Eos stays young. In Tennyson’s poem, Tithonus is left to fear that what he has heard may be true: “The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.”
I mean, you kind of wonder who’s behind that last one, but never mind.
In his radiant story “The Immortal,” Borges uses an ingenious narrative to explore what a human life lived eternally in time might actually be like. When the hero Rufus, a Roman soldier, has drunk from what might be the water that will reverse the burden of his immortality, then he cuts his hand on a thorn and feels pain and sees a drop of blood, he is speechless with happiness. In Borges’ thought, one can detect echoes of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, an idea begun as a thought experiment that evolved into a kind of grounding presence in his philosophy: amor fati, the acceptance of oneself, of human fate in general, not in continuation but in a repetition so exact it can’t be told from any of its other versions, just as the übermensch overcomes individual consciousness. It is hardly unique to Nietzsche, this ideation of a transcendent destiny for humankind beyond linear time, a corollary of the intuition that something is amiss in life as we know it: life not overcome.
What I take from both authors is if you are going to imagine immortality, don’t imagine it as only more time. And never try to elude physical death, the ever-available mercy.
So Jeff Bezos or somebody will come up with a way to live forever and stay young? A new twist on an old nightmare. As Yeats observed, we are not designed to live forever and the heart senses this as life experiences repeat with diminishing returns. Our lives are stories—they begin, they grow, they move toward a climax, they end. To continue beyond that point is to kill the value of the experience. Everything derives its value from its death. Love is made real in this life by the fact that we can’t keep what we love forever. If a sunset had eternal life, there would be no such thing as a sunset.
The immortality of Struldbrugs, Tithonus, Borges’ “immortals” or Nietzsche’s unembraced eternal recurrence, is linear—within time. The human brain, locked in time, can sense, but can’t conceive of, a condition outside of time—but to me that is the only immortality that could possibly exist. The reality of things is not their duration but their essence. We conceive of reality as a horizontal line, which technically could extend forever (eternity of duration), but any point along that imaginary line could be infinitely explored, or, for Nietzsche, infinitely lived (eternity of essence).
“Today means boundless and inexhaustible eternity. Months and years and all periods of time are concepts of men, who gauge everything by number; but the true name of eternity is Today.”—Philo of Alexandria
Human experience circles the point of equilibrium between stasis and flux. Our lives are measured, governed by time, but platonically eternal in their essence. Our minds are the mingling place of the temporal and the infinite. All human experience—in fact, all phenomena of the universe—are an interplay of stasis and flux. The episodes of our lives take place in the evolving flux of reality, and always become static as story. Like a staged tragedy in Yeats’ “Lapis Lazuli”: “It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.” For me, that is eternity outside of time.
Eternity within time, as our authors have shown, is not to be desired—and, in fact, is not even possible. Where will you spend eternity? is simply the wrong question. And certainly “born again” does not mean making a correct choice, but changing your state of being. The real question is why have this physical existence at all if it is only an audition for a hideously imagined state of immortality? Borges’ immortals grew so bored they perverted the City of Immortals and retreated into abstruse thought and an ineluctable longing for death. When I think of eternity I think not only of the immensity that will continue past my life, but also of the immensity that preceded it. In the same way that any book is complete in itself but discrete from the library around it, my life is a perdurable island in an infinite ocean. Where will I be after my life is the same question as where was I before it? It’s like asking where the elements of a story were before “Once upon a time” and after “The End”—or what is the fate of a painting beyond its frame—or what continues after the resounding conclusion of a symphony. Stories are flashes of ephemeral conscious awareness in an infinite ocean of unified consciousness. The most bizarre idea in religious thought to me is that people begin but can’t end. I don’t see how something that lives forever can ever have started. It can’t be subject to one end of a timeline but not the other. And if we didn’t start, we must have been in the same state we will be in after we die. Things that don’t exist in time simply are, without an adverb. And if there is an unconditionally loving God of whom we were aware before any of our “Once upon a times,” why live this physical life at all if what we were was so much better? As a test? What idiot would knowingly trade bliss for misery? It makes far more sense to imagine yourself as a timed idea—a story—within a single consciousness to which “you” will return. Some people can’t abide the thought of the termination of their individuality. But there is no such thing as avoiding it. Individuality at what point of their life? Our lives on this earth are a continual process of dying and being reborn. We think surrendering our consciousness—I would say, freeing it to become another story—is losing the sense of “me,” but that doesn’t even happen during life. As you think about all the me’s of your past, each one is like a friend you knew, who died—it’s just like that—you remember them as they were when they were, but they don’t exist outside that context. Just as a character in any story does not exist outside that story. Or the ocean doesn’t exist outside the shore. The line between them is in constant flux, but the ocean and the shore are mutually definitive. In the same way, everything derives its identity, and value, from the point where it ends.
What does human life mean? Why does it exist at all? Is it some kind of improbably cosmic freak chance? A test of our loyalty? Something’s cure for loneliness or craving for entertainment? Something awry that must be set right? A joke with a really anticlimactic punchline? A fable of separation and reunification? But in all cases, why? We want to know God’s motive—if there is a God and he has a motive. Maybe that’s the point: the infinite pursuit, with all its adventures along the way, of a transcendent motive. And what does what does it mean? mean anyway? Asking what something means is a request for a translation into a reduced language of something that can be understood only through experience.
I’m pretty sure What does human life mean? is really over our heads.
But at my age, the only thing I have come up with that I can find any credibility in, and satisfy Occam, is: It’s about the stories. Stories are all. The universe itself is a story, and contains infinite and interconnected stories. All stories are the same: being a story is primal.
That’s my ultimate reality: God loves a good story.
Wanting a story to endure forever is perverse. The trip from “Once upon a time” to “The End” is as eternal as it gets. Wondering where you will “go” after you die is like wondering where a character “went” outside the book, or where your fifteen year old self went. If you want there to be such a thing, you’re going to need another story.
They didn’t go anywhere. They simply are.
“The End” is not the end of life, but of story. Stories exist in time, consciousness exists outside of time. And consciousness is singular. Maybe, for us forever returning to the source like water to the sea, that’s what is sensed as awry in human life: individuality itself. There is something suspect about the dissociation of everything from everything else.
Of course stories are illusions. But where would we be without them?