MOTIVATED BY DEATH

In the essay Immortality I suggested its thermodynamic impossibility. In 1997, the year that I kept the journal that later became the book, One Year (An Invitation to Write), I made the following entry on February, 10:

I’ve always thought it fascinating that storytellers who deal with the subject of immortality always seem to handle it in basically the same way. They invariably create a character who is miserable, and who usually tries to find a way to kill himself.

It is true, a lot of fiction writers have dealt with the subject of immortality, and I think it highly interesting (if not downright amazing) that they all seem to tell the same story, with but variations in the characters and story background.

One of the most memorable treatments of the subject was an episode of the Twilight Zone, in which a character (through circumstances that I honestly cannot remember) discovers that the gift of immortality has somehow been bestowed upon him. After various and sundry attempts to kill himself, the story ends with the character getting arrested, tried and receiving a life sentence.

I made my own effort to create a piece of fiction using immortality as a primary theme, and discovered for myself that, if a character cannot die, it is the only thing to write about. It is impossible to steer your thoughts from that single possibility.

It is of course completely understandable. After all, what could be fairly compared to living forever? The unassailable fact of our death is what is actually motivating us. If we truly believed we could not die, we would probably not do much of anything, and for a very good reason: There would be no reason to do anything.

There would be no reason to work in order provide food, clothing and shelter for ourselves, because the absence of these necessities would matter not one whit.

There would be no reason to seek a mate for reproductive purposes. As mortals, we desire children to replace ourselves, to carry on our DNA. As immortals, we would have no reason whatsoever to do this.

There is virtually nothing we can think of that might motivate us to act if we knew we could not die. The only logical conclusion we may draw from this is that all of our present incentive and/or desire to act stems directly from an intuitive knowledge of our certain death. We know that our time is finite. Therefore, we must fill it to the brim. We must make as much money as we can, gain the command of as many resources as humanly possible, think as many thoughts, feel as many feelings as we can squeeze in to the allotted time given us.

It is only because we can be killed that we climb mountains, not for the legendary reason that insists that we climb them because they're there. If you were immortal, and endless mountains stretched before you, you would not have the inclination to climb so much as a single one of them. By contrast, if you knew that you had but a mere hundred years of life ahead of you, you might likely devote your life's journey to climbing every last one of them.