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immortality might bestow its bounties, just as it is not on our behalf that younger versions of ourselves
once wished for an infinity of desserts, an infinity of Saturdays, a strict finitude of reading. For the
immortals would efface us in time, just as we have awkwardly effaced our younger selves, who linger
sometimes in memory and habit, chastening us.
First to go, perhaps, would be all notions of hurry and ambition. But then again, perhaps not.
Perhaps a second youth of dissipation might descend, as the immortals accustomed themselves to the
novelty of indestructibility. (Cf. ‘orgies and grapes’, cf. ‘Pantheon’, which we well know to be the rowdy
adolescent stage of the Trinity. )
But like all novelties, this one would fade. And it stands to reason that exogenous dangers would
still menace: murder, traffic accidents, lightening. The maturing immortals would eschew open spaces,
unsturdy edifices, the company of their peers. Ensconced in libraries and in cellars, they would nourish
themselves first on history, then on geometry. It would be the greatest of crimes to kill one; perhaps like
setting fire to a library or like bludgeoning a unicorn foal.
The estuary would relentlessly ferry its silts; in the end, the mind of the immortal would be
richer in detail than the world that contained it. Along its convolute hallways would grow a baroque
lichen of memory and imagination. Labyrinths of formulae would divert the restive immortal; lagoons of
theology would quiet it. Relative to the aging past and the ageless future, the present would dwindle to
a triviality, a stylus in an infinite groove. In the end reality would become the simulacrum, for the
immortals would dream a perfected universe, both beautiful and terrifying. Perhaps one dream, in a far
corner of a carnivorous mind, would include the configuration of John Tennes, rising to putter about his
study.