Vitalia had discovered the secret of eternal life. Now she vowed to destroy it.
Two hundred years ago, she had been given the formula for an elixir of immortality by a certain Dr Makropulos. Young and foolish, she had prepared and drunk it. Now she cursed her greed for life. Friends, lovers and relatives had grown old and died, leaving her alone. With no death pursuing her, she lacked all drive and ambition, and all the projects she started seemed pointless. She had grown bored and weary, and now just longed for the grave.
Indeed, the quest for extinction had been the one goal which had given some shape and purpose to her life over the last half century. Now she finally had the antidote to the elixir. She had taken it a few days ago and could feel herself rapidly weakening. All that remained now was for her to make sure that no one else was condemned to life as she had been. The elixir itself had long been destroyed. Now, she took the piece of paper that specified the formula and tossed it into the fire. As she watched it burn, for the first time in decades, she smiled.
Source: ‘The Makropulos Case’, in Problems of the Self by Bernard Williams (Cambridge University Press, 1973)
The tragedy of human life, it is often thought, is that our mortality means that death is the only thing that we know for sure awaits us. The story of Vitalia turns this conventional wisdom on its head and suggests that immortality would be a curse. We need death to give shape and meaning to life. Without it, we would find life pointless. On this view, if hell is eternal damnation, the eternity of life in Hades would be enough to make it a place of punishment.
It is surprising how few people who think eternal life would be desirable think hard about what it would entail. That is understandable. What we primarily want is simply more life. The exact duration of the extra lease is not our prime concern. It does seem that seventy years, if we’re lucky, isn’t long enough. There are so many places to see, so much to do and experience. If only we had more time to do it!
But perhaps we cut our life plans to fit their expected duration, and so, however many years we had, we would still think they were not quite enough. Consider, for example, the phenomenon of ‘middle youth’. A few generations ago, the vast majority would marry and have children in their twenties, or sooner. Now, with more money and the assumptions that we will live longer and can have children later, more and more people are enjoying a kind of extended adolescence, well into their thirties. Compared to every other previous generation, the reasonably affluent middle-youthers get to travel and experience much more. But are they satisfied? If anything, this generation dwells more than any before on what it doesn’t have.
However much life we have, it never seems quite enough. Yet we are not so hungry that we make full use of the time we do have. And if we had endless time, the concept of ‘making full use’ would become meaningless. There would be no such thing as time wasted, because time would be in infinite supply. And without any reason to make the most of the life we have, wouldn’t existence become a tedious, pointless burden?
Perhaps we deceive ourselves when we say that the shortness of life is the problem. Since we cannot alter the duration of our lives, any tragedy that results from its brevity is not our fault. It is harder to admit that we are responsible for how we use the time allocated to us. Perhaps we should stop thinking ‘if only I had more time’ and think instead ‘if only I made better use of the time I’ve got’.
See also
| 19. | Bursting the soap bubble |
| 52. | More or less |
| 69. | The horror |
| 97. | Moral luck |