What constitutes a meaningful life? What gives one life more value than another?
Surely only the individual can hope to grasp the meaning of his or her life. If not
asked if they want the choice to live, it negates that meaning. You have ALS: why
would you want to live? ALS is a killer. But so is life. Everybody dies. But just
because you will die at some point in the future, does that mean you should kill
yourself now? For me, they were asking me to commit suicide. Or to endorse
euthanasia ...
What Would It Be Like to Be 400 Years Old?
HOW TO STOP TIMEBy Matt Haig
325 pp. Viking. $26.
The first thing we discover about Tom Hazard, the protagonist of Matt Haig’s new novel, “How to Stop Time,” is that he is very, very old. He is old, he tells us, “in the way that a tree, or a quahog clam, or a Renaissance painting is old.” Born in France in 1581, he is fast approaching his 440th birthday. Not that anyone would know it to look at him, since outwardly he appears to be an ordinary man in his 40s. This is because Tom has a condition, rare but not unique, known as anageria. People with anageria age much more slowly than ordinary people, at a rate of roughly one year for every 15 ordinary human years. Although Tom lives life at the same pace as everyone else, judging by his appearance, it would seem that “only a decade passes between the death of Napoleon and the first man on the moon.” Immune to almost all human diseases, and assuming he avoids a violent death, Tom can expect to live until he is around 950. With four centuries of life under his belt, he is only just approaching middle age. And like many middle-aged men, he appears to be suffering something of a midlife crisis.
This is not, of course, a new idea. Ever since Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver traveled to the nation of Luggnagg, where the “struldbrugs” age but never die, writers have used the notion of immortality to examine the possibilities and limits of a human life. In recent years Audrey Niffenegger’s “The Time Traveler’s Wife” and Kate Atkinson’s “Life After Life” have both played inventively with the idea of lives lived outside of ordinary time. Haig himself touched on the idea in his previous novel, “The Humans,” which saw an eccentric English mathematician unlocking the secret of prime numbers and thereby the means to rid the world of illness and death. Fearful of the power this would give violent and primitive humans, an advanced alien super-race from the planet Vonnadoria hurriedly dispatched one of their kind to extinguish all traces of his theory. “The Humans” was warmhearted, sharply observed and often laugh-out-loud funny, funny enough to forgive Haig’s alien his regrettable fondness for fortune-cookie philosophy.
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