Paradise News

Here is a story which makes me rethink my idea of history. To actually have a photograph of the wife of Mozart seems a physical impossibility bearing in mind all those 18th century outfits from Amadeus but of course he died young and his wife lived on. There is such a contrast between the brightly coloured images of Mozart’s life and the dour, almost puritanical look of his wife in 1840. It could all be a fake of course; the bloke at the back leaning over looks rather like Hitler who has been the subject of various hoaxes himself. All the women seem to be dressed like Florence Nightingale which gives a further link forward with the sound recording of the founder of modern nursing from 1890 We are around for only a short time but the difference these days, after the sputtering of technology, is that we will gradually become more than just memories when we are dead. Through the sketches of human likeness, through photography and sound recording and video we fade in to a post-death existence that is becoming more and more defined. Soon, with cloning and whole memory recording or even the download of consciousness, we will not die when we die – just step from a fleshy body into a technological one. We must be the first generations to be able to think of this, to be able to defeat our defined and allotted spans.

I know my wife thinks this is horrible and reflecting on it, I am not sure I could take the step if offered the chance of being immortal inside a machine. I sometimes think of the boundary moment when all my memories and parameters for thinking, get absorbed into whatever wonderful machine has been made. It is just a copy – I go on and my other self goes on with no link between the two. Maybe you could see some sort of sphere that gradually absorbs not only your mind but your body as well, creating a continuous line from human to machine existence. I have to go back to Douglas Adams’ mice who tell Arthur that he could be programmed not to miss his lack of brain after it had been removed and diced. Immortality is probably the thing with the greatest gap between what you imagine and the reality. It sounds wonderful but the long game is just one of boredom and ill-feeling. I can imagine many “machines” committing suicide. It might even be built in to the programming. You can select to leave existence at any time. Just how many would last for ever. Obviously I cannot have any real idea of what this existence would be like. What if you could continually transfer your mind from one youthful body to another? What if you could go back to being three yet with the mind of an adult?

And what is the point of any of this anyway? I can always do the naïve rant about what is the point of anything while humans behave so badly to each other but that is human nature. The absorbing process would have to remove that to prevent the transfer of our imperfect world into the machines and by then we would not be human any more, just unemotional machines. Many of us are already. I’m not one for silences; I am sneakily with certain shock-haired MPs regarding the wallowing in self-pity thing but if there is one (and today warrants one even for me) I will respect it and use it for what it is intended – not stick to the letter but laugh and joke silently using written notes and worse still – clap at the end. It is the “I am not part of it so I will ignore it and so doing be part of it” thing. You see the crowds throwing abuse outside high-profile murder trials, behaving in ways that lead to people not having respect for each other. The cycle continues.

Yes I am a repressed member of the English Middle Class. How did you know?

And at last, to Paradise News itself. This is a book by David Lodge in which an excommunicated Catholic priest has his life changed by a visit to a dying relative in Hawaii. I had forgotten how well written this book is. It may suffer slightly in the development of the characters but it is supposed to be a comedy after all. It is easy to read despite some references to theology especially the existence of the afterlife – Paradise News – Heaven – Hawaii - get it? It has a very satisfying ending.

I have been trying to persuade my wife to read it though my warning about some of the theology being against her beliefs has put her off. She has instead at last started to read The Bell Jar and breathlessly announced that is was very well written though this may be an overstatement due to her view that this book, her previous reading, is so badly written. It is just “he said she said, they said”. If you are going to write a biography which is just so much interview, you might as well dispense with the stuff you write yourself and just transcribe the interviews. This worked brilliantly for Jean Stein’s Biography of Edie Sedgewick which just had paragraphs from all associates. Little Miss S by Edie Brickell is about her. However, it sometimes seems that Edie S herself was so out of things for most of her life, that she is just a catalyst for information about The Factory and other things.