The endless life
Bernard Williams · The Makropulos Case · 1973
At thirty-seven, Elina Makropulos drank an elixir that suspends death. Three centuries later, she has known everything, loved everything, lost everything several times over. Passions have dulled, encounters repeat, nothing tastes new any longer: her unending life has frozen into a glacial indifference, and she finally refuses to renew the elixir, as one at last consents to rest. Her story raises an uncomfortable question: what if death, far from being only what threatens us, were also what gives our days their worth?
Would you accept an endless life? If you hesitate, what does that reveal about the place death holds in a life that has meaning?