Hanging On Forever

I once asked Jay Scott, The Globe and Mail film critic, a number of years before his passing from AIDS, if he was afraid of dying. “I’m afraid of not being alive,” he said, responding with his usual alacrity to loose ponderings in our tweedy arts ghetto at the newspaper. “There’s a difference.”

While some Buddhists discern little difference in being or not being alive, seeing death as simply part of an infinite churn, humans have echoed Scott’s concern since time immemorial: Neanderthals buried kin in a fetal position in anticipation of rebirth. We have run with remedies to extend life from harvesting the lichen from the skull of a hanged man (medieval superstition) to the transplanting of ape testicles onto human gonads (1920s science). Semang pygmies believed that having all bones broken and eyes reversed to look inwards would permit immortal access to breast-milk fruit on...