The Afterlife, and What Comes After

“Survival” comes from the French “sur vie” – literally “on life” but actually more like “more life.” (Prepositions don’t always translate smoothly.) Many people feel that a fear of death, and a longing to believe that death is not the end, is the primary motivator of religious belief. I think that’s too narrow a view of what religious belief offers people. But it certainly is a powerful motivator.

In one of my favorite pieces of fiction, the Twilight Zone episode “Long Live Walter Jameson,” the title character (a man who has been alive long enough to know Plato) says that he came to believe that if a man couldn’t live forever, there was no point in living at all.

Most stories about long-lived people try to teach us that the desire for immortality is vain and foolish. In Natalie Babbit’s “Tuck Everlasting”, Winnie is told by an immortal, “Do not fear death, but rather the unlived life. You don’t have to live forever. You just have to live.” Who can forget the horrible struldbrugs from Gulliver’s Travels – they can’t die, but they lose all their physical and mental powers. Lonely immortals are everywhere in science fiction – I highly recommend Grotto of the Dancing Deer by Clifford Simak, The Boat of a Million Years by Poul Anderson, “Requiem for Methuselah” (an episode of Star Trek) by Jerome Bixby, and the movie The Man From Earth, also by Bixby. “The Coming of the Ice” by G. Peyton Wertenbaker appeared in Amazing Stories in 1926; it features a man who gave up procreation to achieve immortality and ends up cold and heartless (get the double meaning of the title?)

Why do we long to live forever? Not everyone does. Read Silverberg’s brilliant novella, “Going.” But, most of us have felt like Walter Jameson. What’s the point of collecting experiences, growing, changing, if it all ends up fading into eternal nothingness?

I have a counterpoint to this. Suppose there is an afterlife. There are two possibilities. Either this life is our only opportunity to learn, grow, and change, and in the next part we are “locked in” forever – never changing, learning nothing new, always just as we are now. Or, we continue to grow and experience and those experiences add, and subtract, from the total of what we are.

I think only the second possibility holds any appeal. Who wants to be a statue in a museum forever, or to repeat the same experiences over and over, or to learn nothing from any new ones we might have? I’m already tired of the stories I tell on first dates.

But if the second possibility is true, and we keep changing – what would we become in a thousand years? A million? A hundred billion? I can barely relate to the person I was thirty years ago. Sometimes, he seems like me, and there is a sense of continuity. Sometimes, he seems like a stranger, and his motivations and feelings and hopes are a mystery to me. In any case, he’s gone. I’m here now.

How much more would this be so in a hundred years? And….how much of your past could you even really remember? In Jeffrey Sackett’s odd novel, Mark of the Werewolf, immortals forget literally everything; their brains can only hold about an ordinary lifetime’s worth of information. They don’t even know their own birth names.

Without a sense of continuity, in what real sense would I remain I?

Suppose someone showed you what you would be like in a thousand years, and you saw someone who had long ago grown bored with everything that gives your life meaning now. Perhaps your future self has outgrown all the people you fear to die and leave, so he never talks to them. Perhaps the changes in your circumstances have altered your sympathies; perhaps in the next world, you relish watching acts of cannibalism in arenas with crowds of other thousand year old beings who hiss oddly to show their satisfaction and have replaced body parts with animal limbs.

You might be saying, “I would never change that much!” But, look how much you have changed in the few short years you’ve lived.

That person a thousand years from now would not be me. I have little interest in his continuance. But the me I create in this short life can go on, in the affect I have on this world and in the unchanging scroll of life that I am making my marks upon right now. I don’t want the memory of the me I am to be reduced by the shadow of some future being who claims a connection to me through sheer continuity.

As Walter Jameson said, “We love a rose because we know it will die. Who ever loved a stone?”