The Angel of Death by Evelyn De Morgan
We all know the scene. The one where the mad genius cackles in a loud defiant voice, “I have defeated death forever! I will live forever as a machine! No one can defeat me now!” Cue escalating evil laugh.
Then our hero arrives - “Not if I have anything to say about it!” Cue epic battle scene.
I’ll skip ahead. The good guy wins. The mastermind had become too smart for his own good, creating some sort of disturbing technological innovation that would allow him total power, total control, and maybe even immortality. The cost is likely many innocent lives sacrificed in the name of ‘progress,’ or perhaps simply the sacrifice of his own soul, as he cuts himself off from all that is good and beautiful - and human.
Sometimes there is a backstory, as there often is in real life. This mad scientist lost his mother when he was a child and all his life has never accepted her death. Maybe he’s created some sort of resurrection machine that he thinks will bring her back from the dead. Maybe the fact that he saw someone he loves die has struck a terror so deep inside him that he cannot fathom his own death.
Our hero arrives to remind us of the sweetness of life - of virtues like hope and faith and self sacrifice. Sometimes the hero might even die in the process of saving this mad scientist from his own dangerous ends. We all recognize the hero for her simplicity, her conviction that there are ‘more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy’ - and that of the few things we do know, the preservation of the innocent, the goodness of love, and the promise of hope are very much worth fighting for.
We all know this story.
Or at least I thought we all did.
But this afternoon I read an article by The Free Press - The Tech Messiahs Who Want to Deliver Us from Death. This is the stuff of science fiction, the stuff you’ve heard alluded to in articles or interviews with tech gurus and autocrats, this is the promise humanity has been in search of - deliverance from death.
24 year old Kai Micah Mills is convinced he knows how. He’ll freeze himself, his parents, his sister, and soon, an elderly dog dying of cancer, in a sort of suspended animation, waiting for the day a cure is found for whatever killed them. Then they’ll be resurrected, ready to rejoin society and revel in their immortality.
He’s not alone in his hopes. The article lists many other thought leaders, tech innovators, and business people investing their time, money, and vision into various enterprises geared toward everything from making our organs ‘younger’ to uploading our consciousness to a computer to freezing or other methods of reanimation.
Whenever I read these sort of things, my mind flashes back to the mad scientist scene, played out in various ways across so many stories in books, television, and movies. Don’t they know? I want to ask, Don’t they recognize the bad guy anymore?
It is then that I read that Mills only read his first book at age 21 - “The Future of Humanity” by Michio Kaku (a book devoted to space travel and humanity’s ultimate destiny of immortality).
We literally don’t know these stories anymore.
Death and Life by Gustav Klimt (1915)
“You can't have living without dying. So you can't call it living, what we got. We just are, we just be, like rocks beside the road.”
- Angus Tuck, Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt
Mills probably has never heard the story of Winnie Foster, a young girl who runs away from her overbearing family and finds adventure, love, and belonging among a strange family in the woods. The Tucks are joyful and kind, inviting Winnie into their world, a world that, for them, has remained largely unchanged.
They are fiercely protective of a spring in the woods. They warn Winnie not to drink from it. Winnie’s young friend Jesse looks seventeen, but in reality he’s over a hundred years old. Eighty-seven years ago he unwittingly drank from the spring of immortality and he’s been frozen in time ever since.
The family refers to their situation as a curse.
When Winnie is separated from Jesse and the rest of the Tucks, she has the chance to drink from the spring. She knows where it is and what it can do.
Decades and decades pass. The final scene has Jesse return to town looking for Winnie. He doesn’t find her. He finds her grave.
“In Loving Memory, Winifred Foster Jackson, Dear Wife, Dear Mother 1870-1948''
“Good girl,” he smiles.
She made the right choice. She lived. She died.
Mills also probably hasn’t read Tolkien, who portrayed Death as the greatest Gift the Illuvatar could bestow upon Men.
"But to the Atani [Men] I will give a new gift."
In the original design of Middle Earth, Death would be the gateway for mankind to sing the Music of the Ainur, a fate envied by the Elves, who were doomed to the physical world through all its ages of grief and sorrow. The Elves, like the Tucks, have to watch all they love grow old and change, and they become burdened with the many trials of the world. Death, for men, was a release, a freedom. It also gave the brevity of their days an intensity and a sweetness envied far and wide across Middle Earth. Death was the gift given to Men. It was only through the shadow of Morgoth that a fear of Death wound its way into Men’s hearts and they tried to avoid it and conquer it.
Still, in the Fallen age of Men there were still those who saw it as the Gift it was. King Aragorn was one who accepted it.
Arwen gives up her immortal right to sail West and leave the trials of the Earth, living forever without ever experiencing the pain of Death. I choose a mortal life, she insists to her loving and disbelieving father. She chooses her husband, she chooses a child. She chooses death.
In the beginning of the Fourth Age Aragorn surrenders to Death like a friend.
“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
Franz Kafka
Tolkien was a Catholic and his belief in a world beyond our own is palpable throughout the Silmarillion, his creation story, and The Lord of the Rings. So perhaps you dismiss his Christian hope as another form of Death Escapism.
Perhaps.
But it was Victor Frankl, who survived the Nazi death camps and became the father of “Logotherapy” and existential psychology, who insisted that the meaning of life could never rest on so random a fact as whether one lived or died on any given day. No talk of Heaven or Hope of reunions or Finding Joy on the other Side. Just the nature of life. We live, we die, and it is in part, because we die, that life has any meaning at all.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Victor Frankl
Tolkien readers will now remember the other gift of the Illuvatar - Free Will.
When Frankl was in the death camps he noticed that the ones who survived were often the ones who did not despair. Perhaps they had faith in God, perhaps they did not, but they had faith that their lives mattered whether or not they died, numbered and forgotten in a death camp. The very fact of their being in this world was important. It mattered that they continued to draw breath and stand alongside their fellow human beings, in the horrors of this world, as well as its joys.
Maybe Mills has seen the movie Troy and while a severe departure from Homer, has its compelling moments, as when Achilles explains,
The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.
Or what of that other Brad Pitt classic, Meet Joe Black? When Death ‘takes a holiday’ and tries to see what this being human is all about. He chooses a rich and successful man - William Parish (Anthony Hopkins) - to get a taste of the ‘good life’ and he does. He enjoys good food and beautiful houses and sensual thrills. But what he learns is that Bill Parish is a great man not because of his material wealth but because he loves deeply and fiercely, something he cannot understand until he is forced to give up the object of his love instead of taking her back to Hades with him.
The meaning of life is in relationships, not in self preservation.
Joe Black : I don't care Bill. I love her.
William Parrish : How perfect for you - to take whatever you want because it pleases you. That's not love.
Joe Black : Then what is it?
William Parrish : Some aimless infatuation which, for the moment, you feel like indulging - it's missing everything that matters.
Joe Black : Which is what?
William Parrish : Trust, responsibility, taking the weight for your choices and feelings, and spending the rest of your life living up to them. And above all, not hurting the object of your love.
Joe Black : So that's what love is according to William Parrish?
William Parrish : Multiply it by infinity, and take it to the depth of forever, and you will still have barely a glimpse of what I'm talking about.
Maybe Mills has heard of Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster, but has he thought of how these creatures of gloom and fascination and nightmare can only ever be a sick parody of real, flesh-and-blood life? Can he see that the ones who seek to live forever have to sell little parts of their humanity in the process?
In our obsession with immortality we forget our fragility. A freak driving accident, a sudden diagnosis, a trip on the sidewalk… No one is guaranteed another breath or another day. To obsess so much on the perseveration of the physical is to sacrifice the precious moments we do have, to build on those things that do last, even beyond our last breath.
It is also some sort of great irony that at this very moment of avoiding death we are also embracing it in the form of Euthanasia, with horrifying stories coming out of Canada (where the practice has been embraced whole heartedly) of poor people, disabled people, and depressed people dying (with government assistance) at alarming rates. Clearly our desire for immortality is closely tied to our obsession with the material. I doubt Mills or any other of these tech leaders would be seeking out immortality if it meant a life of poverty or a lack of material wealth.
Does Mills know the story of Harry Potter? Has he seen the grim and miserable broken soul Voldemort becomes in his quest for immortality? He shatters and destroys and hides parts of his own soul in the form of horcruxes. Is this so different than “uploading” one’s mind or freezing one’s brain? We’re cutting up our bodies in our desperation to preserve them and in the process losing sight of the only things that do conquer death once and for all.
“In the end, love wins. It does win. We know it wins. When a person dies, love isn’t turned off like a faucet. It is an amazingly resilient part of us.”
J.K. Rowling
St. Paul says that the last enemy to be defeated is Death. And that Christ has already defeated it. How? By dying.
In the eternal paradox of the Christian faith Death ‘loses its sting’ in the promise of self sacrifice. Who can be afraid anymore? Yes there is the promise and the Hope of Life beyond the walls of this world, now we see darkly, but someday we shall see clearly - but there is also the image of a Rabbi who loved his people so fiercely he let himself be nailed to a Cross.
The great stories teach us that Life is brief and brilliant and beautiful. That Death is as inevitable as breathing, that the moment we are Born we are Dying, but that to be afraid is to miss the thrill and that to be so obsessed with avoiding the inevitable is to give up what makes us human.
It is natural and normal to fear death, and to mourn and be saddened by it.
Christ wept by Lazarus’s body.
But in our obsession with avoiding pain and sadness, and yes, even death itself, we may lose the very spark of what it means to be a human being on this planet, whirling through space, at this very specific moment in time, with these very specific people to know and love, and maybe even to lose.
The Great Stories teach us these things. They teach us the truths we know but cannot always believe.
I hope we remember them.
“Do not fear death, but rather the unlived life.
You don't have to live forever. You just have to live.”
- Tuck Everlasting
for more listening on this topic, highly recommend this Risking Enchantment episode:
The Doom and Gift of Men: Stories of Death and the Desire for Immortality
I was reading through with a nod, until I reached: "It is also some sort of great irony that at this very moment of avoiding death we are also embracing it..." Whereupon I could not bring myself to accept this false equivalence. It is no irony, but balance. I believe there is a world of difference and suffering between those seeking to cling onto life and those seeking to depart it. Hubris against Dignity.
And since death is freedom for men, isn't it an act of bondage to bar it? It is the Free Will of Ilúvatar, which you mentioned, that binds the right to live inextricably to the right to die. Just as Denethor was condemned for suicide before his duty was carried out, Aragorn forsook his life with the tacit approval of the author, in a way strikingly alike to euthanasia: farewelling his friends and laying down to sleep. He willed his own death as surely as if he had dealt himself the blow.
Thus he reasoned to Arwen, "...ask [yourself] whether you would indeed have me wait until I wither and fall from my high seat unmanned and witless."