The Importance of Being Dead
Sherwin Nuland: The reason there’s interest in people like Aubrey de Grey and the other life extenders has to do with the temper of our age, which I think of as narcissistic...
Aubrey de Grey: It’s not a question of living to a thousand or living to two hundred, even – I mean, I don’t know if I even want to live to a hundred, but I do know I that I’d like to make that choice when I’m ninety-nine rather than having those choices gradually taken away from me by me declining health.
Sherwin Nuland: It is my debt to everything that has come before me, and it’s my obligation to everything that comes after me, that I die within my allotted time.
Labels: Death; Good death
posted by Charles Cowling at
09:59
4 Comments:
I am so with Sherwin on this, as I imagine would be all readers of this blog. The hubris involved in trying to live that long is mindboggling. As daft as his beard.
I would urge any one who hasn't read Sherwin's book How We Die to do so before they do. As reassuring as it is unflinching. Up there with Marie De Hennezel's Intimate Death and Tom Lynch's The Undertaking. Essential.
Worrying, isn't it, that not everyone can see (or feel, at an almost instinctive level)that it would be truly frightful to live for 1000 years. Babies would have to become very rare events indeed or the planet would get knackered even more quickly.
It is our time-defined bodies that make life pleasant, or even bearable. I mean, here I am, at age never-you-mind, repeating anecdotes to people a week after I've first told them, and listening to friends doing the same to me - can you imagine doing that for 1000 years? Well, we wouldn't, because the murder rate would go up something alarming.
And does de Grey really think he could sit down at 99 (or 87, or, er...today? No, tomorrow, or...when would the right moment be?)and decide "Hey, I'll extend my life now" as if it was deciding whether to have tea or coffee? I think the poor man is just scared of his death.
Autumn is so beautiful because it was produced out of summer and yet winter is coming, spring is so wonderful because it evolves, changes - and finishes.
I want to hand over to children and grandchildren - de Grey would find his grandchildren would be all but his peers when he was 500. Horrible thought.
I don't think I'm over-simplifying here. We have evolved to think and feel as we do for max ?110 years, more like 75-80 perhaps.
In "Lord of the Rings" (stop sniggering and listen, O scholarly ones) old Bilbo says he is getting thin, stretched out. That's partly the ring - but it's also because he has lived on past the hobbit life-span. Good insight. Who wants to be a soppy elf anyway?
Will chase up the book references, thanks Rupert.
I think this madman is doing us all a big favour, by making us realize that we WANT to die. Don't worry, Gloriamundi, it'll never catch on.
(Incidentally, imagine that beard a thousand years from now!)
I am happy to die whenever my number is called........I just hope it's before 104.5 which is when my gran died....she was fine, but time for a change of scenery and new adventures I recon.
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