Who Wants to Live Forever?
The Highlander is a cult classic about Connor McLeod, a Scotsman who is chosen to engage in an immortal battle of good versus evil. He is played in the four Highlander movies by Christopher Lambert. The weapon of choice is the broadsword and the age is imprecisely Medieval. Who should school Connor in the sacred ways of the sword, but an unconvincing Spaniard (more likely a Glaswegian) played by Sean Connery. Somehow Connery is believable as a teacher of immortality and the whole implausible fantasy is very compelling. There are multiple followers of the sword, those that protect the good and those that promote the evil. The notable villain is a fierce and recognizable character actor named Clancy Brown. He is big and nasty (he played the bad prison guard in The Shawshank Redemption) and entirely irreverent.
One of the more interesting elements of the movies are that the whole immortality theme gets played out both in Connor’s inability to die and his and his combatants’ ability to time-shift over millennia. When we see Connor in modern day, he is a cultured but very private dealer of antiquities. He is quite wealthy as any man would be who understands the time value of money and uses his immortality to simply accrete value by holding ownership of things over the eons. I’m not sure that all Highlander fans think about net present value and future value, but surely finance people would. It is a reminder to us all that we wished we had saved more when we were young. Then again, the quandary of saving is in calculating one’s own longevity as well as balancing the net present value of pleasure in contrast to the possible future value of money. Isn’t that the fundamental question of life? Pleasure today or comfort tomorrow.
When two swordsmen meet, they are driven by nature to fight one another. That fight is called The Quickening and it is some cosmic force that weakens them to strengthen them. They cast the movie well because Lambert has just the right look for the role. He looks strong, but he has sorrowful eyes. He is determined to uphold good versus evil, but he is oddly resigned to a sad fate of outliving everyone he loves. The theme song of Who Wants to Live Forever reverberates in the background during each dramatic duel. The rules that govern this odd contest are that “There can be only one.” Eventually good or evil will triumph, even if it takes an eternity.
The writer of The Highlander, Gregory Widen, knows the formula for an epic and winning saga. Good versus evil, immortality, time-shifting, no good deed going unpunished, this has it all. When the movie Love Story by Erich Segal came out or The Bridges of Madison County (Robert Waller), we learned how literary professors could divine the perfect formula to tug at the heart strings. They would write to that formula and produce great love stories that would gain immediate popular traction. Stan Lee and Marvel certainly know all about formulaic writing for impact.
What the Highlander does for me is that it gives me perspective on life and loss. The older I get and see my friends and family encountering debilitating or chronic health problems I think about the quality versus quantity of life. The more I see older people hanging on well into old age (for some that’s nineties to one hundred, for others it starts in their seventies), the more I am given to questioning the absolute value of longevity. And then I ask myself if I am qualified to make such judgements. Perhaps they can only be made in the age of the moment, but society frowns on that kind of thinking. Children cannot be relied on for objective judgement. They are either driven by guilt and parental love or they are healing wounds of youth in selfish ways. Either way, that decision is definitionally flawed. Society and religion both saw this issue coming years ago and have debated euthanasia ad nauseam.
My Pension Professor side tells me that this will become a huge issue for mankind soon. Some say immortality is already within reach scientifically. I had a student who had studied the issue quite intensively and swore he could and would live forever. That billboard on the West Side Highway of Manhattan that says that the first person to reach 150 years of age is alive today is a scary reminder. I think it was put up by a life insurance company, for whom the notion is good news, while the pension and annuity companies cringe at the actuarial thought. One way or another, longevity is replacing infant mortality as the moral conundrum that needs to be addressed. Unfortunately, it is not as clear as infant mortality because there are two sides to the story.
Everything in life has a cost. For the Highlander, the cost of immortality and conquering evil is that Connor McLeod must wear those sad eyes all the time as he wearily watches his lovers fade into oblivion. For the rest of us mere mortals, we have all manner of practical concerns. Will we outlive our savings? Will we be a burden to our children or society? Will we outlive the quality of our life and sink into a hobbling feel-bad mess that can only vicariously participate in anything fun? Will we be abandoned by our families and the community to live out our days staring out the window or worse yet, into our own shrinking souls?
No one likes to ask these questions and even fewer like to be forced to answer them. Whenever anyone around me talks of the worries of aging I just say, “Who wants to live forever?” I rarely must explain the comment. No one seems confused by it even though few are willing to endorse it. In the movie Harold and Maude (another true cult classic), Ruth Gordon, a woman of advancing age and eclectic tastes (she attends funerals for fun and steals cars as a lark) declares that she will end her life on her eightieth birthday to make way for the next generation. It was a radical and kooky thought when the movie came out in 1971, but today it neither seems radical or kooky. Dylan Thomas told us to rage against the dying of the light. Maude tells us rage against the lingering of the light. There is a time for Dylan Thomas and a time for Maude and only you can answer the question of who wants to live forever. But it is a worthy question we should all ask ourselves a few times at least.
Ah, age again, or not. ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” Or it doesn’t toll at all, as the case may be (To the great chagrin of the heirs if a lot of $$$ is concerned). Einstein said something like ‘if you travel in a straight line fast enough, long enough and far enough, you will eventually get back to where you started’. So would living forever be enjoyable or become monotonous? The former Stan Lee’s Marvel Universe has many characters who supposedly will find out. Does living forever mean you are always the same looking person? If I looked like Thor I think I could deal with it. The Buddhists believe that the life you come back to could be better or worse depending upon the way you live this life. So you better be good for goodness sake.
I enjoyed the movie ‘Hot-tub Time Machine’ because, as you mentioned, it deals with accrual of wealth when the one traveler, who stayed in the tub, comes back to his friends as an obscenely wealthy person. He had invested in Apple’s first IPO, if I recall correctly. I also liked the episode of ‘Dr. Who’ when he travels to the moment before the end of time. He just stands in the door of his phone-booth and looks out, saying nothing. Then again, there are those who say ‘time’ is a man-made construct. Another theory is that all of time happens at once. Then there is Doc Brown explaining to Marty McFly in ‘Back To The Future’, that certain things could result in a ‘time paradox’ that potentially could cause the destruction of the universe and time I assume. However, in the end, when Marty finds out that Doc was wearing a bulletproof vest because he DID read the warning letter. Marty asks him about the warnings Doc had given him about doing such things. You had to love Doc’s answer. “Yeah, well,… I figured what the hell…”
We can also get into the much researched idea of parallel universes or multiverse. As Doc Brown drew on his chalkboard, in ‘Back to The Future II’, an alternate timeline was created when Biff got hold of the sports almanac. A couple of scientists actually calculated how many alternate universes there could be. In an article in Forbes, August 2018, some scientists say they have discovered remnants of another universe. This stuff drives me crazy.
My personal belief is that the idea of eternal life evolves from our concerns and fears of what happens after death. In Monty Pythons’ ‘Life of Brian’, the fellow crucifixion guy next to Brian asks why he is looking so down in the mouth? The fellow continues to say “you come from nothing, you go back to nothing, so what have you lost? Nothing !”. It then leads into one of Pythons’ best songs ‘Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life’. Sorry for that slight digression but it actually dovetails into the circular thinking about deaths’ aftermath.
Religion, faiths, rituals, creeds, etc., etc., etc., (again, I believe) are to answer the unanswerable. To those who eschew belief in God or a ‘hereafter’, I have to ask ‘so what if others choose to believe? If these things give comfort and don’t hurt you, no matter how wrong they might be, who cares?’. The operative ideas being comfort and not hurting you. Although they have all too often been the excuse for just that. L Ron Hubbard took starting your own religion differently and said it is the fastest way to get rich. Now there’s a goal for you. If having faith and believing in a afterlife turns out to be true, perhaps it will earn you some brownie points when you get there.
From physics I have created my own theory. It is said that matter cannot be created or destroyed only changed from one form to another. I transpose that onto our ‘being’ or ‘soul’ or whatever you want to name it. So whatever shape or form we came from or will go to is a shooting match, a crapshoot. We won’t know until we get there.
Though the theory that matter cannot be created it is a little counterintuitive when wondering about the creation of the universe in the first place.
Does any of this give me personal comfort. As many in New York say ‘Eh, I should know?’.
I do find it fun to think about, notwithstanding.
Sincerely, The Forever Thoughtful, Lonny
Good segue