You can’t be too careful what you wish for.

It has probably been a decade now since a guy unfriended and then blocked me. That’s not the interesting part. We weren’t what you would call close friends. We were barely acquainted. The interesting part has to do with who he is professionally, and what seems to have been the source of his animus. I believe he’s a law professor. I know he certainly got his law degree from an Ivy League school. We had had few interactions on Facebook up until the day he blocked me. Those interactions had always been positive. Then one day I started a thread about mortality. Try as I might, I can’t remember if this was before or after my wife was diagnosed with cancer. I have no idea what prompted this online discussion. Was it the death of a famous person? My grandfather’s passing? My mother-in-law’s? Was it a reflection on my mentor’s sudden and freak death by drowning in 1999? I don’t know.

            What I do remember is that I had said something about my own desire to live forever. Immortality – nice work if you can get it. This wish was expressed half as a joke. I also recall the substance of my acquaintance’s reaction: Grow up. I don’t remember the exact words but I think it in part did include the phrase, “That’s what being an adult is all about.” You aren’t really an adult until you rid yourself of your foolish desire to live forever – that was the general thrust.

            I may have responded to his comment. I’m not sure. I think I said that this was only a wish that I have. This is not a belief. I don’t have a plan on how to achieve everlasting life. I’m not trying to convert anyone. I don’t have a religious agenda.

            A few days or even weeks after that, I discovered that the man had blocked me subsequent to this exchange when someone on another person’s thread tagged him in a comment. I could see his name, but not any of his comments. I entered his name in the search field. Sure enough, he was gone.

            This man’s reaction isn’t theoretically surprising. I’ve encountered a lot of people who are what you might call militant atheists. Some of my friends even call them atheist fundamentalists. They have this simmering rage toward religion. Like Richard Dawkins, they are on a mission to push humanity past all foolish desires, to wake us all from our dogmatic slumber. What our species needs is to live by reason alone.

            Now, I don’t know about other writers, but I feel it’s my job to put into words as much as I possibly can about human experience. Can everything be expressed? Of course not. Sometimes it won’t be the naming but the attempt to name that is important. This strange interaction I had with the Law Guy suggests something to me: some of us wish we could surgically remove irrationality from our brains. AT some point, this school of thought goes, human beings will beyond the need for religion or fantasy. This strikes me as very Puritanical. I am aware that many people see Puritanism as excessively focused on sex. I tend to use the term more metaphorically. I know people will say that Puritans didn’t or don’t like sex. Such people have never met Baptists. Puritans love sex. They are often obsessed with it. They don’t want YOU to enjoy sex. But purity tests are common to many systems. Stalinism demanded it. Democrats are plagued with in-fighting due to it. Show me a club or a sect and I’ll find the purists. For them everything is simple. Everything is black and white. Everything is categorical. Have you yourself fallen into this trap? I know I have. More frequently than I would care to admit.

            What role can purity play for the fiction-writer? I think s/he needs to confront it at every turn. Whenever there is some Stoic telling us that self-abnegation is the better part of valor, we need to make that a focus of the drama. Someone telling us “Thou shalt not feel x” should be the cynosure of our art. In the case of Law Guy’s rationalism, it doesn’t matter if you agree with him or me, the writer will have to agree that the Big Fight should be all about this desire and the rule that would stamp it out.

            Let’s assume that we all see the intrinsic drama in someone being told they MUST not dream of immortality. Let’s assume that we all agree that death is the last enemy. Let’s assume we see the point of Achilles in the Underworld saying, “I’d rather serve as another man’s servant, as a poor peasant without land, and be alive on Earth, than be lord of all the lifeless dead.” Let’s assume we don’t scoff at the Egyptian kings’ mania for immortality. We’ll set aside Plato and Dante and William Wordsworth’s intimations, of Dostoevsky’s cris de coeur. We’ll shelf whatever Dorian Gray is. We’ll discard T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas. Why do this? In order to ask this: Can we live without a wish to be spared dying? To have our friends be spared as well? Is it even possible? Or will it always be in there? What is the point of all technology if not to finally have power over death? But maybe that should not be the point of all technology. Maybe we should reject that goal on moral grounds. Can we? Are we capable of doing that? Go ahead, try not to desire too much.

            I will even attempt to build some sort of framework for how we might effect this denial. We could become, to borrow from Keats, almost half in love with death. How might that affect policy? Would we care so much about kids in cages at our borders if we were truly half in love with death. Or how do we feel about deaths that arose because of the use (or abuse?) of opioids? Were not those people simply eased into the inevitable? Would being half in love with death mean that responded differently to the covid epidemic?             Well, the rationalist says, we don’t have to go too far in any one direction. Really? We don’t? It is humanly possible to ensure that not just America, but that the whole planet doesn’t go too far in any one direction? No. Not now. But it will be. One day. When the human being is no longer in its irrational infancy.
            I don’t think we’ll ever live that long.
            All of that is really not my theme for today, it’s not the real reason that I write this. I write this as a note to myself that not only do I still see this argument as the one I am most interested in having as a writer of fiction, but that I have discovered a means of dramatizing this argument.
            I have found a character into whose mouth I will put certain words. I’ve found a situation that is perfect for this discussion. It has taken many years longer than I had expected, but I’ve finally found a means of expressing the very deepest human yearning I know of. And I’m damn glad I did.

            It seems to me that the theme of books like Foucault’s Pendulum is be careful what you wish for. Don’t get carried away by your dreams and fantasies. The imagination is dangerous ground. As Milton said of Adam and Eve in the Garden, “O yet happiest if ye seek / No happier state and know to know no more.” But can the genie be put back in the bottle? Can human beings really suppress their wildest desires? Can the rational mind hold the passions in check forever?