Mary Shelley’s Mortal Immortal

Without God, our best hope, we believe, lies with science, in discovering elixirs, or stem cells, or genes that give us immortality.

Only one man drank the elixir in Shelley’s story, The Mortal Immortal.  It was lonely to be the only one.  Apparently the elixir he drank only stopped the aging process.  He could still be murdered, or commit suicide or have a fatal accident.

We will need more than an elixir that stops the aging process.

I have tried to imagine what the world would be like if everyone drank an elixir of immortality.  The mortal immortal had no friends.  I wonder if we would grow to hate each other, even more than we do now.  I wonder if we would feel, as Shelley seems to suggest, even more confined within our bodies.  Would we, in a few hundred years, feel “caged” in our bodies, as the man in Shelley’s story did?  Would we, like him, seek to yield our bodies “to the destructive elements of air and water?”  Would we, like him, seek to set free “the life imprisoned within” our bodies?  Would we seek to annihilate ourselves in a world in which humanity is “so cruelly prevented from soaring from this dim earth to a sphere more congenial to its immortal essence?”

I think we would.  In such a world, annihilation becomes heroic.