The Desire for Unending Life in “This World”

A POPULAR TOAST on New Year's Eve is “Long Life!” As one year slips into the next, we look back and ahead. More pointedly than on other days of the year, we experience time as passing and life as transitory, feeling “that all flows by us, leaving us behind” as Hugo von Hofmannsthal's poem “Über Vergänglichkeit” (On Transitoriness) reminds us. This realization may feel even more unsettling when the promise of life after death that religions offer is no longer deemed convincing; the very meaning of one's life might then be cast in doubt. Even at what we would nowadays call a relatively early age, the Marschallin in Hofmannsthal and Strauss's Rosenkavalier is gripped by this anxiety about time when she gets up “in the dead of night” to stop all the clocks in the palace. After all, as the only beings aware of time, humans are aware of their temporality, the finiteness of their life, which quite literally defines them as mortals. Therefore on New Year's Eve we do not just look back but also ahead, with anxiety about fleeting time but also with a hope that is equally telling about Homo sapiens: the conventional toast at year's end hints at the urge to rebel against the knowledge that we are destined for the grave.

Of course, we do not need the calendar to remind us of this urge. The desire for the prolongation of the normal lifespan, ideally beyond all limits, is as old as mankind.