The Immortal

"This story is about a Roman officer who finds the fountain of youth, a river that cleanses men of death, as he puts it. He becomes an immortal and meets the other immortals who have found the river, and the story is about the consequences of this – namely, madness and meaninglessness. There’s a great deal of speculation among philosophers and religious types about what it might be like to live together. These 20 pages capture it so perfectly. It’s such a fine example of Borgesian writing – tense, lucid, packed with meaning so you immediately feel like reading it again in case you missed something. This Roman soldier, at the end of his quest, comes across a group of troglodytes who are naked and withered, doing nothing but staring at the sky and living on snake meat. One of them is so indifferent and apathetic that a bird has nested on his chest and he hasn’t noticed. After some time the Roman realises that these are the immortals, and this is what has become of them. He also realises that one of them is Homer. He’s impressed at first that this man wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey . But the man says: I’m immortal, and given an infinite amount of time the impossible thing is not to write The Iliad and The Odyssey . Given all eternity, we all do everything – both everything good and everything bad – and we all become the same person, with nothing distinct between us. We are all victim and perpetrator, king and serf. Life becomes meaningless, like a series of jokes when we know the punchlines. It loses all sharpness and definition. This is wonderfully represented in the city of the immortals, which was at first a fantastic city of god, and then turned into this labyrinth with staircases leading nowhere. Exactly. I think we’re lucky we get to live for such a long time. I very much believe in Epicurus’s dictum that we ought not to be afraid of death, because we won’t be there when it happens. And yet the fact of mortality gives life urgency, so we have the best of all worlds."