Secret of Immortality

THE SECRET OF IMMORTALITY

Wandering for a few hundred years on planet Earth, I often wonder why immortal people are so rare : Erdans like myself, who have a middle aged look no matter how old they are and who don’t die except in an accident, or by suicide. I’ve met a few: a seventeenth century adventurer called the Count of Saint Germain, three alchemists and a couple of witch doctors. Enough people to convince me that immortality is possible for Earth people, but no one who discovered the secret in the past one hundred years, even though people are obsessed with the issue. They try grapefruit juice, diets, genetic something or other, all without any results. The immortality process appears to be a very well kept secret.

There are good reasons to it secret. As soon as the elixir is concocted, who do you think will be the first one to use it? A philanthropist? A Mother Teresa type person? Much more likely, it will be a criminal, a drug lord or a military dictator desperate to hang onto power --- the very people who need to die sooner rather than later. Death does the world a favor by ridding a country of an oppressive ruler, and clearing out layers of people with old ideas --- those disinclined to accept change, and who would rest on their laurels for hundreds of years. Without the secret substance, everyone dies --- rich and poor alike. Hero and villain.

Some three hundred hears ago, I met an alchemist who called himself Josephus. He was quite beside himself at having stumbled upon the elixir and he rushed over to show me a vial of the stuff.

“Not bad,” I said. “But why show it to me? Take it to your benefactor, the king.”

“The King?” The alchemist’s eyes bulged with sudden horror, as he realized that Frederick William, the king of Prussia and his selected cronies would be the first to take the stuff and live endless lives: villains secure and in power for hundreds of years, the very people he hoped wouldn’t last too long.

“Take the stuff yourself if you want to,” I said. “But don’t share it with the undeserving.”

“And you enjoy immortality?” Josephus asked.

“Not particularly, but it’s what I’m stuck with. I’ve been tortured a few times by people who tried to pry the secret out of me, so I keep under cover as best I can. Every thirty years I fake my death and disappear, then appear with a new identity in a new country. That way people don’t notice that I’m not aging and don’t ask questions. Of course, I’ve no family, country or roots of any kind, so I can’t get a high level job. I earn a living with these.” I held out my swollen hands with cracked skin.

The next time I saw Josephus he had poured the elixir down the drain and burned his research notes.

Immortality rarely improves people’s lives. With rare exceptions, that Count being one of them, people don’t get wiser or smarter by living longer. Living longer, you accumulate experiences and memories like stamps or photographs, but not necessarily the ability to see through the morass and make better decisions. Patterns of thinking become ingrained and new viewpoints or beliefs are impossible to accept. How many people switch their voting or shopping patterns at the age of eighty, or embrace new technology like a long lost child?

Five years ago, a hobo ran me down in my London flophouse. He told me that he had lived since the early nineteenth century. He didn’t know why --- it had just happened to him. He used to be a rich gentleman. Living on inherited wealth, he hadn’t worked for a single penny in two hundred years. Didn’t know the meaning of work and

I couldn’t explain it to him. He still viewed autos as alien creatures and refused to get into one. He thought that air flight was impossible and that airplanes were illusions created by the devil. He spoke in an eighteenth century accent. Never read today’s newspapers and hardly understood journalistic slang. He craved the sort of food that no one produced for at least a hundred years.

I suggested to him several painless ways of ending his life.

Fifty years ago in Paris, I ran into another immortal, Caliogstro. He had seen many wars and human misery, history repeating itself and societies making the same mistakes. He used to be so enthusiastic about something he called “human evolution” and had concocted various Masonic rituals to help people along. Now, he had given up any hope that the human race would ever advance beyond petty and brutish behavior, and was cynical about his past enthusiasm. I admitted, that it’s difficult to keep hope alive after seeing the same problems for hundreds of years. He’d be happier forgetting about people and studying animal nature, or the properties of numbers.

Only a few people each century stumble upon the immortality elixir, probably because it exists only in limited quantities.

Not everything in the world can be mass-produced. Many wild mushrooms still defy all the technology we throw at them and remain impossible to cultivate. Exceptional artwork or music is also limited in quantity, and doesn’t appear to increase with the size of the Earth’s population. So also with exceptional scientific breakthroughs such as provided by Galileo, Newton or Einstein.

Because the elixir is material doesn’t mean that it is available in any quantity or for anyone willing to shell out the money. If this were so, we’d see more of the elixir. One of its ingredients may be scarce, or the environmental requirements for its production complex enough to make its appearance almost accidental. There’s no guarantee that our science will solve the problem easier than the problem of cultivating the wild mushroom.

People who discover the elixir tend to find it by chance: by cooking an odd fungus growing in their dish, harvesting a strange plant in the Amazon jungle, mixing a concoction with a hundred ingredients. Life appears to dispense exceptional opportunities to people not for any virtue they possess, but because they’re in a position to advance it’s wishes.

I’m certain that the past century has produced at least a handful of immortal people but those ‘lucky’ people, for whatever reason, keep very quiet about their discovery.

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