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Rethinking Immortality
| Article
# : |
17765 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1990 |
3,278 Words |
| Author
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Robert P. Lanza
Robert P. Lanza is research associate of surgery at Harvard
Medical School and senior scientist at BioHybrid Technologies. |
"The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the human body, but there is some part of it which remains eternal."
- Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics
From around the corner came the trolley car, scattering sparks above it. There was a grind of metal wheels, the tinkle of a few coins. With a jolt and a sailing glide, the gigantic electric machine was on its way to my past, back, block by block through the decades, through the metropolitan limits of Boston, till it came to Roxbury. Here, at the foot of the hill where, for me, the universe began, I hoped I might find a set of initials scratched into the sidewalk or a tree, or perhaps an old, half-rusted toy, which I might put away in a shoe box as evidence of my own immortality.
But when I reached that place I found that the tractors had been there and left. The city, It seemed, had reclaimed some acres of slum; the old house I lived in and the houses next door where lived my friends, and all the yards and trees of the years I grew up in - all those things gone. And though they had been swept from the world, in my mind they still stood, bright and heliographing in the sun, carefully superimposed on the real setting. I picked my way through the litter and the remains of some unidentifiable structure. It does not matter, I told myself. I might come here a hundred times before the sentiment of the past would upset my nerve and reawaken in me a sense of mortality.
That spring day - which some of my contemporaries devoted to the Fine Arts Museum, others to contemplation in the arboretum, and others to colleagues at Harvard or MIT - I thus, in a vacant city lot, devoted to sentiment, agonizing over the open-ended and perverse nature of time. Not that I had never seen the fall of leaf, or a kind face grow old; but here, perchance, I might come across some hidden passageway that would take me beyond the nature that I knew, to some eternal reality behind the flux of things.
The extent of the dilemma seems to have been gone over by my predecessors, both the Albert Einstein in the Annalen de Physik and by Ray Bradbury in his masterwork, Dandelion Wine.
"Yes," said Mrs. Bentley. "Once I was a pretty little girl just like you, Jane, and you, Alice…."
"You're joking with us," giggled Jane.
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