MILD SPOILER ALERT!!!!
Last weekend I had the opportunity to watch Dr. Strange in 3D (which, by the way is the form in which this film MUST be viewed) and it really got me thinking about the concept of everlasting life.
Here is a quick synopsis of the story: Dr. Stephen Strange is a renowned neurosurgeon who loses the functionality of his hands in a terrible car crash. After many failed attempts at experimental surgeries and clinical trials to fix his hands, he travels to Kathmandu (the capital of Nepal) in search of some less traditional methods of healing. He meets Mordo, a sorcerer known as the Ancient One who is able to transcend into multiple dimensions and derive various powers from each. Strange ends up scrapping his medical future and teaming up with the Ancient One and her posse to help stop Kaecilius (a former disciple who defected from Mordo’s teachings) from unlocking the Dark Dimension and releasing the all powerful Dormammu into the world.
Where does immortality fit into all of this? This was actually the impetus behind the defection of Kaecilius. In Dormammu’s Dark Dimension, the supreme overlord of evil promised eternal life as well as a fearsome supply of power. In essence, Mordo and Co. were doing everything they could to stop immortality from becoming a reality in our world. Also, later in the film Strange confronts Mordo in anger when he learns that she had been using power from the Dark Dimension to achieve immortality for herself. Clearly, with this writing Marvel strongly labels immortality as a bad thing.
Throughout the history of literature and religion, immortality actually has had many labels, ranging all the way across the spectrum from blessing to curse. Take for example, the Christian Heaven. Heaven is literally everything any reasonable person would want: happiness, joy and bliss for all eternity. Similarly, we have the Fountain of Youth, a mythical source of death-defying liquid that literally inspired conquistadors like Ponce de Leon to undertake entire expeditions in hopes of its discovery. In Greek mythology, ambrosia is the food of the gods. This delightful fare is better than anything humans could ever contemplate, and eating it will give you great strength and longevity.
On the flip side, we see many examples of immortality being used as either a punishment or a desire that is punishable. The Greek story of Sisyphus paints the lack of death in an unfavorable light in several ways. Sisyphus was a deceitful and nasty king in ancient Greece and an overall terrible person. He violated the expectations of hospitality and kindness to travelers many times by killing them. This angered Zeus, who decided to punish Sisyphus by sentencing him to an eternity of pushing a giant boulder up a mountain, and every time the it got near the top it would roll back down only to be pushed up again. The crafty and cunning Sisyphus was then somehow able to temporarily transfer his curse of immortality to all the mortals of the world by chaining Thanatos, the personification of death, into his place and stopping the normal flow from the land of the living to the land of the dead. All of the gods saw the disruption this caused to the world, and the calamity was so horrendous that they were forced to team together to free from Sisyphus from his punishment and restore death to its rightful place in the natural system.
Immortality, in my opinion, would be terrible. There would be no way to live forever without at some point entering into an unending loop of doing the same things over and over again. I can’t think of anyway that I wouldn’t get complacent, bored, and most of all unbearably tired. Dr Strange was actually able to best Dormammu at the end of the film by using immortality or repetition against him. He just annoyed overlord to the point of breaking by using the Dark Dimension’s funky time laws and his own time powers to constantly put Dormammu through the same moment over and over again. It only took a handful of iterations to break Dormammu, so can you imagine what an eternity of the same life would do to a mere human?
I would like to leave you with a quote from the Ancient One that actually inspired this in the first place. As she drifted away from her body into a dimension where the spirit roams free she uttered these words: “Death is what gives life meaning. To know your days are numbered and your time is short.”
I don’t care if life is finite, but I do care if it’s meaningful. Give me death from a meaningful life any day over an everlasting life of meaningless reiterations. When it comes to living, I definitely aim for quality over quantity.
