Vanitas
Work in progress (2016-)
In the first pages of his novel “My Struggle, Part I” Karl Ove Knausgård gives an insightful description of how difficult it is to grasp not existing. It is easy to think of stories and narratives about death, even one’s own, but the actual sight of a human body that has passed into the world of dead objects is almost unbearable.
We try to keep that which is frightening at a distance. Imagine all the small gestures and the energy we put into staying alive every day. Wearing seatbelts, eating healthy food, feeling bad when eating unhealthy food, helmets, e-cigarettes, crossing the street safely etc. But danger is also fascinating and it is an essential aspect of what we call entertainment.
With the development of medical science and technology, it seems very likely that in the near future, the human life-span could be prolonged by tens, if not hundreds or thousands of years; longer than we presently expect to live.
Merging with technology could make us invulnerable and I wonder what that would be like. Again we encounter the limits of our imagination. It is easy to think of life continuing longer than we expect but what would it be like to live without limits? To know that life will not end and live as an eternal being? In the eighties when the creators of Superman had made him virtually indestructible people lost interest in the story.
Perhaps that is part of the human predicament: existence as a vulnerable being can be unbearable but immortality would be even worse.