Immortality

Tuesday

Jonathan Foreman

Will an Austrian detox really help me live longer?

I had never thought much about longevity or even ageing. But once you hit your mid-50s, things shift in irritating ways: love handles become more stubborn, typefaces mysteriously blur, sports injuries take ages to heal and conversations in noisy restaurants start to become puzzles. You haven’t fallen apart but the factory settings no longer apply, and Philip Larkin’s poems increasingly seem more poignant than funny. I apparently am not the only man of a certain age to have had this realisation. Last September, at an autocrats’ conclave in Beijing, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, both 72, wondered aloud if they might be able to extend their lives and therefore prolong their reigns indefinitely.

Tuesday

Stuart Kelly

Doomed to immortality: The Book of Elsewhere, by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville, reviewed

One of the first things I was taught in literary theory was to look for supposed rhetorical rather than logical opposites and unravel them. It works well with ‘the opposite of cat’. Cartoons show this can be either mouse or dog. The Book of Elsewhere, based on the comic BRZRKR, poses something similar with metaphysics. The protagonist, B., or Unute, has a narrative arc quickly summarised as ‘I kill, I die. I come back’. What is the opposite of B.? He is not alive in a way we understand, but he is not dead, or a zombie; he is not undying, and time alone will tell if he is immortal. He feels pain, suffers, ‘dies’ and respawns like a computer game character, bursting out of an egg-like chrysalis, sometime – hence the title – elsewhere B.

Wednesday

Daisy Dunn

The rise of vampirism in Silicon Valley

The Immortals, which begins on Radio 4 this week, is not for the faint-hearted. While it professes to be about the human quest for longevity and the elusive ‘cure’ for getting older, it focuses largely upon the transferral of blood plasma from healthy young people to reluctantly ageing people, or, as anyone with good sense might put it, the desperate descent from vanity to vampirism. I was on the verge of switching over to something more anodyne when a 46-year-old tech entrepreneur began talking about being injected with plasma from his 17-year-old son.