“There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal.”
Borges The Immortal
Why does nothing ever happen? Online there is a sense that the news is a continuous series of non-events. But is this true or just a state of mind? In Borges short story the Immortal, a personal favourite, we meet a Roman soldier who after defeat in battle hears of a river, far away in another part of the world that grants immortality to all who drink from its water. Without much deliberation he sets off in search of the river and its gift.
After a long arduous journey through a labyrinth of landscapes he discovers he has encountered the Immortals before. He failed to recognise them because of their primitive appearance and a seeming inability to understand even basic language. He discovers the city they inhabit is full of passages and doors that lead nowhere and great sweeping architecture with no worldly function.
“This City, I thought, is so horrific that its mere existence, the mere fact of its having endured - even in the middle of a secret desert pollutes the past and the future and somehow compromises the stars. So long as this City endures, no one in the world can ever be happy or courageous.”
Without the fear of death, the immortals have regressed into a cerebral existence where they fail to respond to the stimuli of the physical world. They know that on an infinite timescale all things will happen to all men and so have no will to create. Without a ticking clock they lack motivation so spend their time lost in thought. Now as with all Borges stories there is lots going on, but I want to focus on one element of the story.
This apathy that comes from a sense of immortality is something akin to our experience today. Culture does everything possible to hide death from plain sight. The media bombards us with portrayals of the elderly as youthful and desirable. This death blindness is magnified by an insensitivity that comes from witnessing global events in real time and having less and less first-hand experience. Look at the comments on the conflict in Ukraine. Armchair strategists and passive observers comment for views on videos of real people losing their lives. They care to the extent that it affects their own life but act as if they were reviewing the latest Blockbuster. All this is reminiscent of the passage where the immortals look on with disinterest as the protagonist lay starving in the desert.
“Nine doors opened into that cellar like place; eight led to a maze that returned, deceitfully, to the same chamber; the ninth led through another maze to a second circular chamber identical to the first.”
This quote captures the essence of the internet in the search engine era. You can start out looking for one specific piece of information only to fall into a rabbit hole. Suddenly you have fifty browser tabs open and must remind yourself why you logged on in the first place. You click through several dead links and random sites before realising an hour has vanished. The same connection designed to make information easier to access has entrapped you. One click from the information you need and a whole lot you don’t. And could any line be a more pertinent description of scrolling through social media than this.
“I am not certain how many chambers there were; my misery and anxiety multiplied them.”
We have also exchanged observations for experience. As a collective we equate watching videos with seeing. Why do anything ourselves when we have documented the entirety of human history online. We can choose to lock ourselves away and view everything through a portal. But this makes us numb and easier to influence as we only see what the screen lets us. The media uses this to paint a picture of society lurching from one crisis to the next. Yet we only have enough attention and energy for so many of these. The never-ending horror they present has made us all weary. An animal in nature can only be on alert for so long before it becomes a new baseline. This is what seems to have happened to us.
We can no longer differentiate the real from the artificial and so like the immortals’ stare with apathy. In one section of the tale, he describes how one of the immortals has lain trapped down a hole for some 70 years with no sense of urgency to get out. Why bother to do anything about this situation when another will come along soon enough. We have little control over these narratives so instead try to hyper focus on things within our power to control. This explains the extreme reactions you get online about the most minor of disagreements. Unable to exert power or influence in the physical world we use winning online debates as a consolation prize.
This artificial immortality also seems to affect how we experience time. We seem to exist in a dichotomy between this feeling that nothing ever happens and an acceleration of time. This too has its roots in an online world filled with passive observers. Tarkovsky in “Sculpting in Time” recognised that time feels like it passes slower during novel experiences but only in retrospect. Visit another country for a few days and it races by but when you look back you have a lifetime of memories. During the pandemic for example time seemed to go slower at the time but on reflection we remember little that happened. Mainstream culture has become repetitive like this. Stuck in an endless cycle of remakes with the same jokes or ideas retold by different people.
Near the end of the story the soldier now tired of immortality concludes that there must be a river with the opposite property. That, in an infinite universe there must also be a river that when you drink from it your mortality returns. To cure this feeling, we too must drink from its water. To avoid this false culture of immortality you must accept the limits of time. Only in accepting this can you again find what matters most to you. You must also reject the artificial regardless of how convincing these technologies may seem. A weekend spent in the real world whatever happens is preferable to having every desire satiated in virtual reality. We have struggled with the level of displacement from the physical world already forced upon us. Immersing further into this realm will not improve our condition.
Instead find ways to be bored and unproductive. One of the most interesting and underdiscussed ideas from Marx was that of unproductive labour. Marx felt the way to rebel against the alienating effects of capitalism was to do things that were unproductive economically. Not to do nothing but create beyond capital. Milton for example wrote Paradise Lost because he had no incentive to do so.
“Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. On the other hand, a writer who turns out work for his publisher in factory style is a productive worker. Milton produced Paradise Lost as a silkworm produces silk, as the activity of his own nature.”
Karl Marx
A paid writer would have had to contend with a thousand things other than writing. Among the ambitious there is a culture that you must always be on. That you must only do tasks with the highest ROI. But we only seem to consider ROI for an economic standpoint which is too one dimensional. Make time for a creative hobby and enter it with no expectations. Only by rejecting consumerism and our isolation from fellow man that we can recover from our current spiritual malaise. It is something of a paradox but start recognising that for things to happen you must, for a while at least, accept that nothing will.