Retrospect

THE THOUGHT EXPERIMENT that Barry and Saramago conducted in their novels culminated in relief bordering on jubilation about the passing of the interregnum of immortality and the restoration of “normality.” The euphoria that the prospect of life without end had initially engendered had quickly faded anyway. So, after living through the various horrors of deathlessness, everybody appreciates “life as usual” more than ever before. This heightened awareness allows for an emerging understanding that it is the very limitation of the human life span that makes life worth living, as it offers an opportunity for self-knowledge and self-realization; as such, this limitation is even seen as an indication of death's benevolent or loving attitude to the living. And however different the worlds evoked by Barry and Saramago, they both demonstrate that the only way that the blessings of mortality can be recognized is through the nightmare of its absence. Reduced to such a thesis, the alternative is of course bland, nor does it come across as original, if one keeps in mind the rich variety of the literary treatments of immortality on earth since the eighteenth century (when enthusiasm for life without end was not exactly widespread). Even in a science-fiction thriller, James Gunn's The Immortals (1962), the reader is advised: “For immortality, you must surrender the right to live,” and in one of the most demanding novels of the twenty-first century, Pascal Mercier's Nachtzug nach Lissabon (2004; Night Train to Lisbon, 2008), there is an echo of it: “It would be hell, this paradise of immortality,” whereas “happiness,” even the happiness of living “for the day, … lives on the awareness of passing time, the idler is an adventurer in the face of death.” The philosophical sanction of this conclusion was formulated, with an eye for paradox, and a maximum of resonance, in 1973 by Bernard Williams, the originator of the professional discussion of immortality that is still going strong today: “Immortality, or a state without death, would be meaningless …; so, in a sense, death gives meaning to life.”