Death and Love

I'm reading John Gray's latest book, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death.

It is breaking my heart.

The book focuses on two moments in history in which science was used to either 1. find proof of the afterlife, or 2. overcome death by reanimating the dead and making them immortal.

The first story belongs to late Victorian England; the second belongs to the early years of the Soviet Union.

So far I'm reading the section on Victorian England. It is breaking my heart.

FWH Myers, a Victorian thinker, is one of the major figures of the story. He was adamant that science could be used to find proof of life after death. Gray argues, however, that Myers' quest was ultimately the result of the premature death of the only woman that ever infatuated him. Myers and  had some kind of love affair with this woman, and Gray claims that the "last quarter century of Myers' life was driven by his need to contact a woman he could not acknowledge during his lifetime" (63).

There are other heartbreaking moments. Before he died, Myers had promised his friend William James that he would send a message from beyond the grave, that James would just have to hold a pen in his hand and serve as his medium. After Myers died, James attempted to receive Myers' message: "he sank down on  chair by the open door, his note-book on his knees, pen in hand, ready to take down the message with his usual methodical exactitude... When I went away William James was still sitting leaning back in his chair, his hands over his face, his open note-book on his knees. The page was blank." (11).

Imagine being a member of Darwin's generation. Imagine being the first group of people capable of imagining the world as a meaningless march of speciation and extinction. I am personally haunted by the conclusions of Darwin and his contemporaries. Deep time, evolution, extinction, cosmology. Oh, so painful.

Why is it so hard to live and love knowing that we are all going to die and never be in contact with one another again?

This book is making me imagine what it would be like to bear the implications of Darwinism for the first time. I can hardly take it. The pain is so great. Myers, James, Balfour, all the characters of this book, seemed to have been experiencing such profound existential pain.

How can one just accept the implications of Darwinism and remain jolly and dutiful?

I'm enjoying the book immensely.

I'm finding it painful and cathartic.

Very painful.

Hopefully equally cathartic.