Writer's Block: Who wants to live forever
Aug. 24th, 2010 06:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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True Blood has had me thinking a lot about immortality. We're seeing vampires a thousand, three thousand years old. And none of them are quite sane.
I'm not sure I'd want to live forever. There are too many catches.
Do I keep aging? That'd be a huge bummer, and I say that not as an agist statement but as someone whose medical conditions worsen with each passing year. I'm dreading my arthritis at sixty. But at 600? Would I even be able to move without screaming?
Would I retain my faculties? Or would I end up on what the nurses call the C&T ward, being fed through tubes, babbling about nothing for the next three millennia?
Would I be invulnerable? Because living through the sun going supernova would so not be fun.
Freezing exactly where I am, not so bad. But how do you stay sane after everyone you love is dead, after everything you know is gone? How do you keep up with technology and changes?
Consider Eric from True Blood. Born to a Norse chieftain, raised to be chief himself. A thousand years. That's a long time. I'm having trouble keeping up with forty. Change moved slowly in the first few centuries, then after about 1800, it took off. The Western Hempisphere, steam engines, railroads over the old Roman Roads, Europe forming and reforming, airplanes, telegraph, telephone, cell phones, computers, democracy, socialism and more. Yet he moves through all the times, a part of them and enjoying himself.
I have a feeling, immortality would be more like it was for Ricean vampires. Whatever it is that makes them wish to be immortal passes. The world changes, and they do not. Until they walk into the fire.
True Blood has had me thinking a lot about immortality. We're seeing vampires a thousand, three thousand years old. And none of them are quite sane.
I'm not sure I'd want to live forever. There are too many catches.
Do I keep aging? That'd be a huge bummer, and I say that not as an agist statement but as someone whose medical conditions worsen with each passing year. I'm dreading my arthritis at sixty. But at 600? Would I even be able to move without screaming?
Would I retain my faculties? Or would I end up on what the nurses call the C&T ward, being fed through tubes, babbling about nothing for the next three millennia?
Would I be invulnerable? Because living through the sun going supernova would so not be fun.
Freezing exactly where I am, not so bad. But how do you stay sane after everyone you love is dead, after everything you know is gone? How do you keep up with technology and changes?
Consider Eric from True Blood. Born to a Norse chieftain, raised to be chief himself. A thousand years. That's a long time. I'm having trouble keeping up with forty. Change moved slowly in the first few centuries, then after about 1800, it took off. The Western Hempisphere, steam engines, railroads over the old Roman Roads, Europe forming and reforming, airplanes, telegraph, telephone, cell phones, computers, democracy, socialism and more. Yet he moves through all the times, a part of them and enjoying himself.
I have a feeling, immortality would be more like it was for Ricean vampires. Whatever it is that makes them wish to be immortal passes. The world changes, and they do not. Until they walk into the fire.
