The Fountains of Youth (26 page)

Unlike the suicides falsely claimed by Nyxson’s followers as martyrs, most of whom had been over a hundred, those inspired by his idiot crusade were mostly very young. The movement scored its first spectacular succès de scandale when a sixty-five-year-old woman named Valentina Czarevna took her crucifixion to the limit in 2733. The cult’s most fervent adherents had already begun to cry out that everyone who had lived more than threescore years and ten had already violated the fundamental Thanaticist ethic, but most of those who committed suicide in the name of Thanaticism were somewhat younger. People of my age were far less vulnerable to the tides of fashion.

As the number of Thanaticist martyrs multiplied, so did the variety of the means they selected, although they always preferred violent deaths. They usually issued invitations and waited for large crowds to gather before putting their plans into action. Jumping from tall buildings and burning to death were the most popular methods in the beginning, but these quickly ceased to be interesting. As the Thanaticist revival progressed, those adherents prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice sought increasingly bizarre methods in the interests of maintaining media attention and outdoing their predecessors. EdEnt’s masters soon changed tack, deploring the suicides and ostentatiously refusing to broadcast them, but it was obvious to everyone that they were merely anticipating
the fact that the familiarity would breed audience contempt.

The total number of individuals involved in the Thanaticist “movement” was very small. In a world population of more than three billion, a handful of deaths per week was a drop in the ocean, and the maximum attained by self-appointed Thanatics was less than fifty in a month. “Quiet” suicides continued to outnumber the ostentatious Thanatics by a factor of five or six throughout the period when the pornography of death attained its climatic phase.

Even so, it seemed terrible thing at the time, and I could not help but take a keen personal interest in every development. I confess that in spite of my fierce determination to maintain a scrupulous objectivity befitting a historian, my opinions drifted slightly with the tide of fashion.

I
never took part in another live debate after having been so comprehensively upstaged by Hellward Nyxson, but I did continue to give occasional interviews to casters, and even to pose as an expert—in which capacity I soon found a settled line of my own to peddle with practiced efficiency, like every other habitual media whore.

The questions I was asked once the backlash against Thanaticism began went relentlessly back and forth over the same reactionary ground. Is the new fascination with death a kind of social sickness? How disturbed should we be by the discovery that the sanity on which New Humans pride themselves has proved to be so fragile? Ironically, honesty forced me to moderate my own opposition lest I should find myself condemning my own work along with Nyxson’s crusade.

“The contemporary fascination with death is by no means inexplicable, nor is it necessarily unhealthy,” I argued, earnestly and frequently. “In the days when death was inescapable, people were deeply frustrated by the imperious imposition of fate. They resented it with all the force and bitterness they could muster, but it could not be truly
fascinating
while it remained a simple and universal fact of life. Now that death is no longer a necessity, it has perforce become a luxury. Because it is no longer inevitable, we no longer feel an oppressive need to hate and fear it, and this allows us to take an essentially
aesthetic
view of death. The transformation of the imagery of death into a species of pornography is perfectly understandable, no matter how regrettable it may be.

“Planning a life is an exercise in story making. Living people are forever writing the narratives of their own lives, deciding who to be and what to do, according to various aesthetic criteria. In olden days, death was inevitably seen as an
interruption
of the business of life, cutting short life stories before they were—in the eyes of their creators—complete. Nowadays, people have the opportunity to plan
whole
lives, deciding exactly when and how their life stories should reach a climax and a conclusion. We may not share the aesthetic sensibilities of those
who decide to die young, but there is a discernible logic in their actions. It is not helpful to dismiss them as madmen.

“We assume that our biotechnologies and nanotechnologies have given us the power we need to regulate our mental lives, but we have resisted roboticization. The freedom of the human will is rightly considered our most precious possession, setting us apart from even the cleverest AIs. We must recognize and accept that this freedom will occasionally be exercised in strange ways and should be prepared to defend the rights of the strangers in our midst. The decision to die young, even though one might live forever, is an exercise of freedom.”

The Thanaticists were by no means displeased by my adoption of this argument, and Hellward Nyxson took to describing me as his “first convert.” The more lavishly I embroidered my analogy, declaring that ordinary emortals were the
feuilletonistes
, epic poets, and three-decker novelists of modern life whereas Thanaticists were the prose-poets and short-story writers who liked to sign off with a neat punchline, the more the diehard Thanatics grew to like me. I receive many invitations to attend suicides, and my refusal to take them up only served to make my presence a prize to be sought after.

Perhaps I should emphasize that I was then, as I am now, entirely in agreement with the United Nations Charter of Human Rights, whose ninety-ninth amendment guarantees the citizens of every nation the right to take their own lives and to be assisted in making a dignified exit should they so desire. I continued to harbor strong reservations about the way in which the Thanaticists construed the amendment and to detest their solicitation of suicide, but I never sympathized with those extremists who argued for the amendment’s repeal while the Thanaticist Panic was at its height in the 2730s. The item’s original intention had been to facilitate self-administered euthanasia in an age when that was sometimes necessary, not to guarantee Thanatics the entitlement to recruit whatever help they required in staging whatever kinds of exit they desired, but a principle is a principle and must be upheld.

Some of the invitations I received during the latter phase of the Thanaticist craze were exhortations to participate in legalized murders, and these became more common as the exhaustion of ready models forced later “martyrs” to become more extreme in their bizarrerie. I refused to
have anything to do with such acts, and often urged the would-be martyrs to reconsider their actions, but they continued regardless.

By 2740 the Thanaticist martyrs had progressed from conventional suicides to public executions, by rope, sword, ax, or guillotine. At first the executioners were volunteers—one or two were actually arrested and charged with murder, although none could be convicted—but as the Thanaticists became more desperate to reignite the waning glare of public attention they began campaigning for various nations to re-create the official position of Public Executioner, together with bureaucratic structures that would give all citizens the right to call upon the services of such officials. It was taken for granted at first that they stood no chance of success, but this proved to be a mistake.

Even I, who claimed to understand the cult better than its members, was astonished when the government of Colombia—presumably desirous of taking the lead in the nation’s ongoing competition with Venezuela for recognition as the home of the world’s aesthetic avant garde—actually accepted such an obligation, with the result that Thanaticists began to flock to Maracaibo and Cartagena in order to obtain an appropriate send-off. I was relieved when the UN, following the death of Shamiel Sihra in an electric chair in 2743, added a further rider to the ninety-ninth amendment, outlawing suicide by public execution.

By this time I had given up making media appearances that only seemed to cement my reputation as a Thanaticist sympathizer no matter how hard I tried to backpedal and distance myself from the movement. In 2744 I began refusing all invitations to appear on TV as well as all invitations to take part in Thanaticist ceremonies. It seemed to me that it was time to become a recluse once again.

I had a great deal of work to do on the fourth part of my history, and I had had my fill of distractions.

T
he fourth part of
The History of Death
, entitled
Fear and Fascination
, was launched into the Labyrinth on 12 February 2767. Although the furor over Thanaticism had died down, my commentary was immediately subject to heavy access demand. The heyday of the movement was long past, but its atrocities were still fresh in the world’s memory, and it is possible that my title misled some would-be readers into thinking that my commentary would be directly concerned with the Thanaticist creed. Requisitions of material from the first three parts of the history had declined sharply in the 2760s in the wake of the Thanaticism-inspired boom, and I might have set a higher access fee had I realized that the new publication would generate such high demand.

Academic historians were universal in their condemnation of the new commentary, and those who complimented me on the thoroughness with which I had bound together the underlying data were annoyingly few in number. I understood that the enthusiasm with which the publication was greeted by laymen was hardly conducive to academic acclaim, but I felt that I had done the ritual spadework with exemplary efficiency. There were, however, a number of popular reviewers who praised my commentary highly even after discovering that it had nothing explicit to say about the “problem” of Thanaticism. My arguments were recklessly plundered by journalists and other broadcasting pundits in search of possible parallels that might be drawn with the modern world, especially those passages that seemed to carry moral lessons for the few remaining Thanaticists and the legions who feared and were fascinated by them.

The commentary attached to
Fear and Fascination
extended, elaborated, and diversified the arguments contained in its immediate predecessor, particularly in respect of the Christian world of the Medieval period and the Renaissance. It had much to say about art and literature, and the images contained therein. It had substantial chapters on the personification of death as the Grim Reaper, on the iconography of the
danse macabre
, on the topics of
memento mori
and
artes moriendi.
It included comprehensive analyses of Dante’s
Divine Comedy
, the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, Milton’s
Paradise Lost
, and graveyard poetry. These were by no means exercises in conventional criticism; they were elements of a long and convoluted argument about the contributions made by the individual creative imagination to the war of ideas, which raged on the only battleground on which man could as yet constructively oppose the specter of death.

My text also dealt with the persecution of heretics and the subsequent elaboration of Christian Demonology, which had led to the witch craze of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. I gave considerable attention to various thriving folkloristic traditions that had confused the notion of death, especially to the popularity of fictions and fears regarding premature burial, ghosts, and various species of the “undead” who were said to rise from their graves as ghouls or vampires. To me, all these phenomena were symptomatic of a crisis in Western civilization’s imaginative dealings with the idea of death: a feverish heating up of a conflict that had been in danger of becoming desultory.

The cities of men had been under perpetual siege from death since the time of their first building, but in the Middle Ages—in one part of the world, at least—the perception of that siege had sharpened. A kind of spiritual starvation and panic had set in, and the progress that had been made in the war by virtue of the ideological imperialism of Christ’s Holy Cross had seemed imperiled by disintegration. That Empire of Faith had begun to break up under the stress of skepticism, and men were faced with the prospect of going into battle against their most ancient enemy with their armor in tatters.

Just as the Protestants were trying to replace the Catholic Church’s centralized authority with a more personal relationship between men and God, I argued, so the creative artists of the era were trying to achieve a more personal and more intimate form of reconciliation between men and death, equipping individuals with the power to mount their own idiosyncratic ideative assaults.

The Medieval personalization of death, whether as a hooded figure carrying a scythe or as the leader of the dance of death, seemed to me to be part and parcel of the re-creation of human personality. This was the
period in which the individual gave way to the ego, in which the humans of the Western World first attained the privilege of uniqueness. As the human personality became unique and idiosyncratic, so did the death of that personality. Death became a visitor knocking at the door and demanding admission. The ghostly voices that had formerly been bound together into an ancestral chorus became distinct as the dead became as distinct and idiosyncratic as the living, demanding specific reparation for particular slights. The ever-present ancestors of the tribe and the demons of general temptation were replaced by lone haunters and possessors who settled upon equally isolated victims. The universal war against death dissolved into a chaotic mass of hand-to-hand combats.

I drew numerous parallels, of course, between what happened in the Christian world and similar periods of crisis that were discernible in other cultures at other times, but I cannot deny that my study of
Fear and Fascination
was ethnocentric in the extreme. It was, I suppose, inevitable that so many of my peers would claim that my cross-cultural analogies were fatally weak and that such generalizations as I attempted were illusory, but that was the temper of the times with which I was trying to deal. No other period in history saw the emergence of such sharp distinctions between the technological and moral progress of different cultures—distinctions that were not significantly eroded even by the global communication systems of the twentieth century, until the Crash came. We take the philosophical and economic bases of the Oikumene too much for granted, and it is difficult for us to imagine the extremity of the inequalities that afflicted the world throughout the Second Millennium.