What would have to be true about us, and about what we love, for living forever to be a gift rather than a sentence?
In a play that opened in Prague in November 1922, a woman walks into a lawyer's office in the middle of a century-old inheritance case and turns out to know more about it than the documents do.[^capek] She goes by Emilia Marty. She has gone by other names. The first was Elina Makropulos, and she is three hundred and forty-two years old, because a court physician to a sixteenth-century emperor tried an elixir of life on his daughter and it worked.[^williams]
The arithmetic is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that she is bored — not tired, not grieving, bored in the way that has stopped being a mood and become a climate. The philosopher Bernard Williams, who borrowed her for the title of an essay in 1973, described her like this:
> Her unending life has come to a state of boredom, indifference, and coldness. Everything is joyless: "In the end it is the same," she says, "singing and silence."[^williams]
At the end of the play the formula is there for the taking and she will not take it. A young singer holds the parchment over a candle and it burns.
I have never met anyone who wanted to die. I have also never read a story about not dying that was not, in its bones, a horror story. It had not occurred to me until recently that both of those cannot be simple.
We spend enormous sums postponing death, and we also keep telling each other that the ones who managed to stop it went wrong — the vampire damned rather than lucky, the gift a sentence in disguise. Nobody has to explain the end of the Makropulos play to an audience. They arrive already knowing that three hundred years of a person is too much person.
The ancient consolation attacked the first of those. Epicurus and, after him, Lucretius argued that death cannot be an evil because there is nobody there for it to be an evil for — when death is present we are not, and when we are present death is not.[^lucretius] Williams thought that fails: if the good things of a life are genuinely good, having them longer beats having them briefly, and wanting anything at all gives us a reason to resist the thing that ends all wanting.
That reasoning does not stop where we would like. If longer is better, longest is best, and we are committed to wanting never to die — which returns us to Elina in 1922, with nothing left that she wants.
Williams is worth taking slowly, because his is the best argument I know against the thing this site exists to commend, and it is not about evidence. He grants the possibility and asks whether we should want it.
His case rests on what he calls categorical desires — the wants that are not conditional on our being alive but are themselves the reason to go on living. A man who wants to see a daughter married has something pulling him into next year; take that away and the wish to survive has nothing to stand on. From this he draws two conditions any offer of endless life must meet:
> namely that it should clearly be me who lives forever. The second important condition is that the state in which I survive should be one that, to me looking forward, will be adequately related, in the life it presents, to those aims I now have in wanting to survive at all.[^williams]
Then he closes the trap. Elina keeps her character, so everything that could mean anything to a person of that character has already happened; experience arrives without touching her, and she goes detached and withdrawn. Change the character enough to keep things fresh and the first condition fails — whoever is having the fresh experiences in 2500 is not her. He considers the escape philosophers usually take, an eternity of absorbing intellectual enquiry, and rejects it for a reason I find hard to get around: absorption works by making us lose ourselves, and a self that has been lost is not a self that survived. Nothing less will do for eternity, he writes, than something that makes boredom unthinkable — then he asks what could be that, and cannot find it.[^williams]
There are answers to him. John Martin Fischer has argued that some pleasures are repeatable rather than self-exhausting, and that a life stocked with enough of them need never go stale.[^fischer] That does not reach the difficulty. Elina is not short of pleasant recurrences; she has had every recurrence there is, and the having emptied them.
So the honest position is that Williams is right about the elixir. An endless human life, lived by a fixed character among the same furniture, curdles — and anyone offering more of that is offering no gift.
And yet one sentence in the essay has stayed with me longer than the argument it belongs to, because I think Williams gave away more in it than he meant to:
> boredom, as sometimes in more ordinary circumstances, would be not just a tiresome effect, but a reaction almost perceptual in character to the poverty of one's relation to the environment.[^williams]
Almost perceptual. Boredom is not a malfunction in us; it is us accurately noticing that there is not enough here. Which moves the question. We had been asking whether a human self can bear endlessness; his own sentence turns it into a question about what there is to be related to, and that is not a question about psychology at all.
Scripture agrees with him about the elixir and says so at the first opportunity. The response to the fall in Genesis is not to leave the way open and hope for the best, and the reason is stated outright: lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever[^gen3] — cherubim, a flaming sword turning every way, the road closed. Whatever else that scene is, it is not the act of a God who thinks more of this, without end, would be a kindness. Qoheleth reaches the same verdict from underneath, in the flattest line in the wisdom literature: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.[^eccl] Under the sun, nothing on offer passes Williams' second condition. He and the Preacher are describing one exhaustion.
Which is why it matters that when the New Testament defines its central promise, it does not reach for a measurement.
> And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.[^jn17]
Aiōnios zōē — and then a definition that says nothing about duration and everything about an object. The verb underneath that they might know is ginōskōsin, present tense, a knowing under way rather than a knowing completed.[^greek] Not arrived at and filed. Still going.
This is Keller's reading of the verse, and the frame of everything on this site is his: eternal life named by what it knows rather than by how long it runs.[^keller] I had heard that a hundred times as a devotional grace note. Beside Williams it becomes an answer to a specific objection — that no activity can hold a conscious creature's attention forever without dissolving the creature.
Persons are the exception, and the evidence is already in hand. The people we have known longest are the ones who can still surprise us; nobody finishes a person. When we say we have someone figured out we have not completed a study, we have stopped attending, and the flatness that follows reports a poverty that is ours and not theirs. To be absorbed in a person is the one absorption that does not blur us, because being known is what makes us particular — now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.[^cor]
The first condition is harder, and Christianity answers it with neither memory nor character, neither of which Williams thinks will carry the weight across centuries.
One man in this story has actually crossed from a mortal life into an endless one, and when he walked back into a room to prove it was still him, this is what he offered:
> Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.[^lk24]
Hands and feet. Not a recollection only he could have, not a turn of phrase — damage. A week later he holds out the same evidence to the one man who would not believe without touching the marks.[^jn20] The continuity of the risen Christ with the crucified one runs through a body that still bears what was done to it, held there by God rather than by anything the man does to hold himself together. What survives in Christian hope is no essence that floated free. It is this person, history and all.
And against Williams' fear that a world of deathless people would flatten into sameness, the promise runs toward particularity so sharp it is nearly private: a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.[^rev2] One name, known to the giver and the receiver and to nobody else.
Neither of these is an argument that the resurrection happened, and I am not pretending otherwise. They are an account of what is being claimed, worth having straight before deciding whether to believe it. But it is a different claim from the one Williams refuted. He dismantled the elixir — and the elixir is the thing Genesis blocks with a sword.
So Elina refuses, the parchment goes into the flame, and she is right to let it burn. What was on offer was more of herself, and she had had — in Williams' phrase for the predicament — altogether too much of herself. Nobody should want that, and the Christian hope has never been that, whatever we have let people assume by talking about living forever as a question of length.
Williams noticed one more thing about her without pausing over it. Because she was the only one of her kind, every relationship required concealment; she could not be known by anyone in the room without giving herself away. Three hundred and forty-two years, and not one person in any of them who knew who she was.
That is the poverty. Not the years.
[^capek]: Karel Čapek, Věc Makropulos (The Makropulos Affair), first published and first staged at the Vinohrady Theatre, Prague, 21 November 1922; adapted as an opera by Leoš Janáček (composed 1923–25). See The Makropulos Affair. [^williams]: Bernard Williams, "The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality," in Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956–1972 (Cambridge University Press, 1973), 82–100. Quotations here are from the essay as reproduced in this text. Williams gives her age at the time of the action as 342; the play's own arithmetic is given slightly differently. His closing phrase is felix opportunitate mortis — "as it can be appropriately mistranslated, lucky in having the chance to die." [^lucretius]: Williams is summarising Lucretius, De Rerum Natura III, in the tradition of Epicurus; the Epicurean formula he cites is that when death is there, we are not, and when we are there, death is not. Williams, "The Makropulos Case," as above. [^fischer]: John Martin Fischer, "Why Immortality Is Not So Bad," International Journal of Philosophical Studies 2, no. 2 (1994): 257–70, distinguishing self-exhausting from repeatable pleasures. [^gen3]: Genesis 3:22–24 (KJV). [^eccl]: Ecclesiastes 1:8 (KJV). [^jn17]: John 17:3 (KJV). [^greek]: John 17:3, ἵνα γινώσκωσιν σὲ τὸν μόνον ἀληθινὸν θεόν — ginōskōsin, from ginōskō, present active subjunctive, third person plural; the present stem carries ongoing rather than completed action. Parsing per the John 17:3 word study. [^keller]: Timothy Keller, "Eternal Life" (sermon on John 17:1–5), Gospel in Life — gospelinlife.com. Summarised here in our own words from our sermon notes, not quoted. [^cor]: 1 Corinthians 13:12 (KJV). [^lk24]: Luke 24:39 (KJV). [^jn20]: John 20:24–29 (KJV). [^rev2]: Revelation 2:17 (KJV).