Alexander Waugh
On and On and On
How to Live Forever or Die Trying
By Bryan Appleyard
Simon & Schuster 307pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
How to Live Forever – just what is needed right now – is a concise, clear and phenomenally interesting account of the immortality industry. Not that many of us really want to live forever. Who could stomach an eternal existence, with all its concomitant sorrows and inconveniences, the inevitable collapse of all personal ambition, the infinitely diminishing enthusiasm for other people, places, activities and things, a dread of the morrow, and a total boredom with oneself – who wants all that? Yet while thinking folk might shudder at the prospect of living on and on like Ariston, they still refuse to embrace the alternative, for death remains every bit as distasteful as immortality.
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