Immortality Isn't For Everyone

  On the question of immortality, it occurs to me that very few people attain it. No one attains it in the flesh, of course, but there are a few that have attained it in the historical sense. Ramses II, Albert Einstein, and everyone’s favourite angry Jew, Adolf Hitler. These names carry different connotations, of course, but they are immortal all the same.

What’s interesting to me is that we can all name a lot more people that could go on this list. But, if I were to gather 25 people together and ask them to make a list of people that will be remembered forever and then eliminated all the overlapping names, and correct for specificity to the individual (by that I mean weird “heroes” people have that no one else has ever heard of), we would end up with what would appear to be a significant list of people whose names will live on through time.

However, that list would contain the names of an infinitesimally small fraction of the people that have ever lived on this flying ball of quickly warming mud.

   The stark reality of things is that you and I are more than likely going to pass quietly into obscurity; vanished forever in the black river of time, never to be remembered again. For all the Pharaohs and philosophers we remember and celebrate and learn about in school, there were millions of regular people that no one today has ever heard of or ever will hear of again.

Those people walked on the same ground we do. They breathed the same air, looked at the same moon, and breathed the same air again (it's a repetitive process, breathing). They even drank the same water if the water cycle is taken as fact, and yet, there’s nothing of them in the history books or museums of the world.

   Napoleon had an army. Presumably a pretty big one considering his ambitions, yet no one can name a single foot soldier that fought and died on his battlefields. It’s safe to say Julius Caesar had a servant or two skulking around the old palace but ask anyone to give you a name of even one of them and they’ll fail to do so. The crafty people out there will make up a Roman sounding name and try to pass it off as the real deal; those are my people.

   We are taught these days that we are all important and destined for greatness when the truth is we just aren’t. We won’t lead a great army on a crusade of global conquest because we have to work tomorrow. We won’t be inventing the next wheel (a name quite noticeably absent from the historical record, actually), or miraculously saving the royal family from certain doom with a valiant defence of the throne. We simply won’t do much of anything and then we’ll die.

   That’s it. That’s the whole of existence for literally 99.99% of human beings in this universe. Does that make you sad? Angry, maybe?

    It shouldn’t. It’s simply the inevitability of life. There can only be so many names in the textbooks, or they would be unruly and difficult to read in a single school year. Can you imagine how much time you would waste as students trying to read and remember the lives of everyone that’s ever existed? What would be on the final exam? Tell me three things about that girl Vanessa Lombard that went to Parkview Elementary School in North York during the 1921-22 school year for 12 marks? Who was Tom Gregory Adams’ dog named after in Westchester, 1532? 6 marks.

    Impossible. And if I may be so bold, boring. Regular people are forgotten because of just how regular we are. That’s how it should be. We are here very briefly, we do next to nothing of importance, and then we die. No fuss, no muss. Our only real purpose is to make more humans, so the species continues until the sun explodes or we are struck by a large fast-moving rock hurled at us from impossibly far away billions of years ago when there was suddenly a very loud noise.

      For you and for me, my literate friend, our names will only be spoken for a few brief years after we die. By our kids, grandkids, and possibly for the exceptionally long lived, great grandkids, and some friends if we were the social type. One day, the last person ever to have known us will die, and we will be forgotten forever.

Even that short stint of an afterlife only happens if we don’t get killed by a bear or a trip over a stray hair-tie at the top of a staircase and rupture something important on the way down before we have kids. We may make it to one level of the procreative process and have a child or two, but then suffer a lack of continued living at the hands of a particularly distraught dairy farmer who doesn’t see us out for a walk on a country road while he’s driving his truck around for some farm related reason. In cases like that, there are fewer people left behind to tell stories about us, as we slip into the darkness from whence we came sooner.

    With that in mind, I say have kids. Have lots of them. And encourage them to have lots of kids. too. Not for the sappy feel-good reasons your read about in greeting cards, but so that there’s more people that remember you for just a little bit longer. So there’s a few more people telling their kids about their great gramma or great grampa and how great they really were. That’s really all we regular folks can ask for from father time. To last just a little bit longer in the memories of our loin fruits and their loin fruits, and so on. Maybe one or two of us will get on the list of forever names, but who really cares when you’re dead?

Julius Caesar by Unknown Sculptor: Both Dead

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