![]() But if we can continue forever, how will we combat tedium? Arnold Schwarzenegger in The 6th Day is dismayed to meet a copy of himself. ![]() 'Oh, we've all been killed before,' shrugs a resurgent colleague. 'I got killed twice in two hours,' brags a clone in Roger Spottiswoode's film The 6th Day. We are advancing into territory staked out by science fiction. So a society that more or less indefinitely postpones death or seeks to outwit it, whether by dosing us with pharmaceutical nostrums or by cryogenically freezing cadavers to await resurrection, is experimenting with a future that will be somehow 'post-human'. Gods do not need to die, and animals do so without knowing about it in advance it is the special prerogative and the demoralising curse of our species to spend life in the anticipation of an end. The Greeks saw human beings as creatures defined by their mortality, which is why they invented tragedy. Sceptical but as anxious as the rest of us to have the sentence commuted, Appleyard investigates the industry that caters to what he calls 'human life extension' (which sounds to me as if a lengthened lifespan were somehow related to those straggly synthetic fronds that Victoria Beckham weaves into her hair). Our response, inevitably, is to cruise the internet in search of a remedy for death. Now, despite our precautions, we can't help noticing the evidence of decay: fogged-up senses, mastiff-like jowls, creaky joints. In subsequent decades we concentrated on streamlining the body with gym subscriptions and faddy diets. In the Sixties we cultivated the self, psychedelically liberating it from the constraints of reality. Born in the late Forties, we grew up in a world that promised a cure for all diseases, along with a barrage of labour-saving gadgetry that freed us for the pursuit of pleasure. I belong, like Bryan Appleyard, to the first generation in human history to regard mortality as a personal affront rather than a biological destiny.
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