Thursday, April 26, 2018

Fourth Dimensional Quicksand


I’m not a good multi-tasker. Strictly speaking no one is (see Technology: The Myth of Multitasking), but some people are much better than I at switching focus rapidly this way and that. Yet, when I read I do sometimes – but only sometimes – also play background music quietly. When engrossed in a book I don’t hear it. When my attention drifts I begin to hear it, then I pay attention to it, and soon I’m refreshed enough to become engrossed in the book again. This works only with novels and narrative history; for textbooks or other materials that require more cognitive effort, I read in silence. The stereo was playing quietly last week while I read Matt Haig’s novel How to Stop Time. My attention drifted from the novel for a couple minutes when the all too apt number by The Rolling Stones Time is on My Side started to play. This was, needless to say, one of the Stones’ early songs, for no one over a certain age – probably no one over 30 – ever would write those lyrics. Time is never on our side. We all begin to hear mortality snicker well before we earn our first gray hairs.

A very very long life has been a human fantasy since we’ve been human. It has been a staple of imaginative fiction since there was literature, and nothing short of immortality is ever quite enough. Desire for immortality is central to the plot of the 4000-year-old tale of Gilgamesh. In Voltaire’s 18th century scifi tale Micromegas a native of Saturn complains to a visitor from Sirius about the shortness of the 15,000 year average Saturnian lifespan: “You see how it is our fate to die almost as soon as we are born; our existence is a point, our duration an instant, our globe an atom.” In Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels the struldbrugs are immortal, though they age normally and so just get ever more infirm. GB Shaw’s multi-centenarians in Back to Methuselah are much more vital. Robert Heinlein imagined a secret society (the Howard Foundation) of the superannuated in Time Enough for Love and other novels. Poul Anderson follows eleven apparently ageless people in The Boat of a Million Years from 310 BC into the far future. Claire North features an odd sort of immortality in her novel The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. There is the whole Highlander saga. Those are just a small sample.

The premise continues to attract present day authors. In Haig’s first person 2017 novel, small numbers of secretive people age normally until puberty but then slow to a ratio of 1:15, so that someone who is barely middle-aged could be over 400 years old. They once remained hidden and frequently changed identities so as not to fall afoul of witch hunters; in the modern world they do so to avoid being lab rats. The narrator Tom Hazard, born in 1581, teaches history in modern day London. He belongs to the Albatross Society, which helps with the increasingly difficult task of providing new identities for its long-lived members. Tom still grieves for his short-lived (“mayfly”) wife and has yet to heal a 17th century rift with his daughter, who has inherited his peculiar condition. Haig keeps a wistful tone without ever becoming maudlin, and mixes in enough adventure and intrigue to keep the plot moving. Thumbs Up.

A glance at his bio shows that Haig was 41 in 2017, the same apparent age as his 436-year-old protagonist. This doesn’t surprise me. 40 is the stereotypical age at which we become acutely aware of the passing of youth. We develop a deeper sense of connection to the past. As anyone 40+ knows, the past is not so distant nor so disconnected from the present as it seems at 18 or even 30. The Vietnam War, for example, is as far back in time today as World War 1 was when I was in school, and I know how ancient the latter seemed to me then. Neither seems ancient to me today.

As for the future, most of us choose most of the time to shove those nagging thoughts of mortality to the back of our minds and behave as though we really do expect to live forever. Perhaps this is no bad thing. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be the first to be right.

Dorothy – Ain’t Our Time to Die

2 comments:

  1. It would be interesting if science could discover a way to slow down the aging process. I'd be all for it. Of course if one could live that long, you'd want to adapt that process at the right age, like perhaps from 30 to 40. We'd all be like a society of Eloy I guess. I assume some might still pass due to some diseases or car wrecks or would there be flying cars by then?

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    1. Where there are Eloi there are likely to be Morlocks, I should think.

      Yes, the youth element is important. That's the punch line of the old myth of the Sybil, of course. She asked Apollo to live as many years as the number of grains of sand she scooped up in her hand. He granted the wish, but since she forgot to ask for youth she aged and shriveled over centuries until she just wanted to die.

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