{"id":60043,"date":"2013-09-16T11:32:44","date_gmt":"2013-09-16T15:32:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=60043"},"modified":"2013-09-16T11:44:37","modified_gmt":"2013-09-16T15:44:37","slug":"the-immortality-chronicles-part-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/09\/16\/the-immortality-chronicles-part-5\/","title":{"rendered":"The Immortality Chronicles: Part 5"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"lord-byronlarge\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What have we not done to live forever? Adam Leith Gollner\u2019s research into the endless ways we\u2019ve tried to avoid the unavoidable is out now as\u00a0<\/i>The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief, and Magic Behind Living Forever. Every Monday for the next two weeks, this chronological crash course will examine how humankind has striven for, grappled with, and dreamed about immortality in different eras throughout history.<\/i><\/p>\n

In the late 1700s, a Scottish quack named James Graham, Servant of the Lord O.W.L. (Oh, Wonderful Love), became the talk of London for claiming anyone could live to 150 simply by making regular visits to his private clinic, the Temple of Health. Graham encouraged valetudinarians to rub themselves with his patented ethereal balsam. He also advocated earth baths, in which naked patients climbed into holes in the ground and were covered neck deep in mud. He spoke of the salutary effects of thoroughly washing one\u2019s genitals in cold water or, even better, in ice-cold champagne. His most in-demand device, however, was the celestial bed, a massive stallion-hair-filled mattress supported by forty glass pillars that administered mild shocks of electrical current. Graham\u2019s clients hoped the effects of \u201cholding venereal congress\u201d in the bed would cure barrenness—or at the very least help them live longer, if not forever.<\/p>\n

Graham was only forty-nine years old when he died in 1794—a pivotal, auspicious year in the history of immortality. It was the same year that Blake engraved his\u00a0Songs of Innocence and Experience<\/i> with lines about being a happy fly whether he lives or dies, about immortal eyes in forests of night, about \u201cthat sweet golden clime \/ where the traveler\u2019s journey is done.\u201d What Graham sought in the physical, Blake found in the mystical. His visions showed him \u201cwhat eternally exists, really and unchangeably,\u201d that \u201cwhich liveth for ever.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

1794 also marked the publication of Thomas Taylor\u2019s translation of Plotinus\u2019s On the Descent of the Soul<\/i>, a third-century CE exposition on the eternal nature of the human soul. It opens with the following line: \u201cOften when by an intellectual energy I am roused from body, and converted to myself, and being separated from externals, retire into the depth of my essence, I then perceive an admirable beauty, and am then vehemently confident that I am of a more excellent condition than that of a life merely animal and terrene.\u201d The soulful Neoplatonic philosophies rediscovered by Taylor deeply influenced Blake\u2019s conviction that \u201cnothing ever dies,\u201d notes Kathleen Raine in her magisterial study Blake and Tradition. <\/i><\/p>\n

1794 also happened to mark the publication of Coleridge\u2019s sonnet \u201cTo William Godwin, Author of Political Justice<\/i>.\u201d That year, still a student at Cambridge, Coleridge started making plans to create a commune in the Pennsylvania wilderness called Pantisocracy. The concept was indebted to Godwin\u2019s utopian writings\u2014hence the panegyric to the greatest immortalist of that epoch.<\/p>\n

Godwin was married to Mary Wollstonecraft (their daughter was Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein <\/i>and The Mortal Immortal<\/i>). While Godwin also wrote novels, including St. Leon<\/i>\u2014about a nobleman who drinks an elixir of eternal life and becomes an immortal\u2014he was best known as a utilitarian political philosopher. He discoursed on perfectibility, the Enlightenment notion that progress will lead to a time when people will never be sick again, when there\u2019ll be no more poverty or war, when we\u2019ll have found a way to make everybody never die.<\/p>\n

Countless intellectuals of the time argued that humankind\u2019s history consists of irreversible betterment. \u201cThe ultimate development of the ideal man is logically certain,\u201d wrote Herbert Spencer. \u201cAlways towards perfection is the mighty movement.\u201d The end point of evolution would be the advent of perfected humans\u2014read immortals<\/i>\u2014in a perfect world. \u201cThe duration of the interval between the birth of man and his decay will have itself no assignable limit,” wrote the Marquis de Condorcet (in 1794, it so happens). Godwin felt that knowledge would one day allow us to indefinitely defer aging by maintaining the human body in a state of perpetual youth and vigor. \u201cIn a word,\u201d he spelled it out, \u201cwhy may not man one day be immortal?\u201d<\/p>\n

The question was variously received as \u201ccurious and somewhat embarrassing,\u201d an \u201cabsurd and irrational assertion,\u201d \u201ca nonsense concept,\u201d \u201cfoolish,\u201d \u201can excessive and eccentric utopian ideal,\u201d and \u201cmere speculation that does not warrant a rational response\u201d\u2014as vol. 33 of the History of European Ideas <\/i>chronicles. Godwin\u2019s ardent enthusiasm regarding perfectibility betrayed him into \u201cextraordinary and chimerical positions,\u201d decreed the Analytical Review<\/i>. Still, their editors granted, \u201cwe may be disposed to smile at their singularity and extravagance.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his famous An Essay on the Principle of Population<\/i>, Thomas Malthus dismissed Godwin\u2019s speculations on immortality as \u201cthe grossest and most childish absurdities.\u201d He nevertheless felt it necessary to engage with them. \u201cMany I doubt not, will think that attempting gravely to controvert so absurd a paradox as the immortality of man on earth, or indeed even the perfectibility of man and society, is a waste of time and words, and that such unfounded conjectures are best answered by neglect. I profess, however, to be of a different opinion. When paradoxes of this kind are advanced by ingenious and able men, neglect has no tendency to convince them of their mistakes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Godwin removed the line about living forever from subsequent editions of his book\u2014although he still believed earthy immortality was possible. Other acolytes weren\u2019t so sure. Early in their lives, both Coleridge and Wordsworth proudly identified themselves as Godwinians. They later renounced the affiliation, acknowledging that they had \u201clost their way in Utopia,\u201d as Hazlitt had it. Wordworth lamented his \u201cproud and most presumptuous confidence in the transcendent wisdom of the age and its discernment.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was a fascinating moment. With secularism and atheism on the rise, romantic poets became spiritualists. \u201cThe poets claimed for art the place in culture traditionally held by religion and philosophy, the place that the Enlightenment had claimed for science,\u201d explained Richard Rorty. To Harold Bloom, these poets fulfill a basic need: \u201cThey perform for us the work of the ideal metaphysician.\u201d<\/p>\n

Percy Shelley, Godwin\u2019s son-in-law, actively sought what Bloom called \u201cthe secret spring of things.\u201d Shelley himself wrote of how \u201cit is only out of laziness or cowardice that we take the objective world to be the real one.\u201d He also acknowledged that trying to become fluent in a language that can\u2019t be spoken may bring us to a place \u201cdark from excessive bright.\u201d<\/p>\n

Keats got there, briefly, as the final lines in \u201cOde On A Grecian Urn\u201d—perhaps the finest poem on immortality ever written—suggest:<\/p>\n

\n

\u2018Beauty is truth, Truth Beauty,\u2014that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

To discuss that which can\u2019t be discussed, Keats told of the \u201csensual ear\u201d picking up unheard melodies, of seeing with awaken\u2019d eyes, of sight in blindness. Fusing senses, Coleridge invoked a kind of aural-vision, a composite seeing-hearing, a light made of sound, a soundlike power within light. To versify his own half-seen intimations of a something beyond <\/i>mutability, Wordsworth used what he termed an \u201cobscure sense of possible sublimity.\u201d<\/p>\n

We come from infinitude, wrote Wordsworth, and there we end up: \u201cOur destiny, our being’s heart and home, \/ Is with infinitude, and only there.\u201d His \u201cOde on the Intimations of Immortality\u201d calls birth a \u201cforgetting.\u201d Our soul forgets that it entered this world trailing clouds of glory from some immortal place. We can rekindle this connection through art: \u201cThough inland far we be, \/ Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea \/ Which brought us hither \/ Can in a moment travel thither.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coleridge\u2019s couplets repeatedly attempted to convey descriptions of the unseen world. The eternal speaks, Coleridge avowed, whether we can hear it or not, whether droplets of incommunicability melt enough to trickle into our imaginations, or whether locked up in frozen muteness. To allude to the metaphysical, to speak of the secret ministry of frost, Coleridge used symbols. In his definition, a true symbol is characterized \u201cabove all by the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal. It always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity of which it is the representative.\u201d Symbols transport us beyond the expressible, he felt, launching us past the limitations of language into inexplicable territory. Coleridge characterized his attempts to describe the unseen world as his \u201cabstruser musings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Byron mocked Coleridge for these efforts: \u201cExplaining metaphysics to the nation\u2014I wish he would explain his Explanation.\u201d He also described Wordsworth\u2019s \u201cExcursion\u201d as a \u201csystem to perplex the sages.\u201d Still, on some level Byron could empathize. \u201cTo be a mortal and seek the things beyond mortality,\u201d he sighed, is to be \u201cconvulsed.\u201d And he certainly knew how that felt. As Shelley declared of Don Juan<\/i>, “every word of it is pregnant with immortality.\u201d<\/p>\n

The romantic poets all had what Shelley described as faithless faith. As Bloom puts it in The Visionary Company<\/i>, \u201cByron rejected no belief, and accepted none.\u201d That didn\u2019t stop him from trying to wrench something out of death that might confirm, or shake, or make a faith. In the end, though, all Byron found was the same mystery his contemporaries found. Whether in 1794 or 2013, we\u2019re still bound by uncertainty. \u201cHere we are,\u201d wrote Byron, \u201cand there we go\u2014but where?<\/i>\u201d<\/p>\n

Adam Leith Gollner\u2019s <\/em>The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief, and Magic Behind Living Forever<\/a> (Scribner) is out now.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What have we not done to live forever? Adam Leith Gollner\u2019s research into the endless ways we\u2019ve tried to avoid the unavoidable is out now as\u00a0The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief, and Magic Behind Living Forever. Every Monday for the next two weeks, this chronological crash course will examine how humankind has striven for, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":581,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7554],"tags":[2186,11845,11848,10681,10258,11849,8476,11846,11852,11714,11850,11847,11851],"class_list":["post-60043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-2","tag-death","tag-james-graham","tag-kathleen-raine","tag-lord-byron","tag-mary-shelley","tag-mary-wollstonecraft","tag-medicine","tag-quackery","tag-romantics","tag-samuel-taylor-coleridge","tag-thomas-malthus","tag-thomas-taylor","tag-william-godwin"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Immortality Chronicles: Part 5 by Adam Leith Gollner<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"September 16, 2013 \u2013 What have we not done to live forever? 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