said to me that to her way of thinking the real goal of life was simple—it was life, more and more of it, moments to days to years down a long winding path through eternity. That the ultimate goal, obviously, was to live forever. She believed that someday we’d master that trick too and was mildly pissed off that ours did not look like the generation who were going to manage it. I remember she cited our ever-increasing lifespan, our extended years of health and vigor. We were moving, she said, in baby steps in that direction. In the Middle Ages you were lucky to hit thirty. Our parents could probably count on seventy. And then the urge toward procreation. A pretty poor substitute for any single organism’s struggle toward eternity but as yet the best we had. Because at least it begged the gene-pool foward, it gave us time, as a species, to get the hang of it. I said I didn’t want to live forever. It would get boring. No it wouldn’t, she said. Think of all there is to learn, all the books you could read, the people you’d get to meet, the places you could travel.
