Do You Really Want to Live Forever? – Death With Interruptions Jose Saramago

Forever Young by Alphaville is a song that comes mind when I think about the subject of this book. The line “Do you really want to live forever young?” kinda sums up the topic that this book explores. Is eternal life really all that? Jose Saramago explores this thought exercise in Death with Interruptions in a way that I have not really seen before.  In lecture Professor Beasley-Murray dove into some very interesting things about politics and death that set off a neuron activation in my mind as a political science major that I wanted to talk about in this blog post. Also the Pixar movie Coco is one that I thought of in lecture that I will bring up now. (and also side note young is a relative term here… I know the people who aren’t dying in this book are not young, but if everyone lives til they’re like 100000 then being 97 sounds like you’re a spring chicken.)

Politics is a social construct that is very interesting to me. I think, as a poli sci major, that studying how different people think the world ought to be run based off of their lived experiences is really funny to me because most often than not they are wrong. In this book, there is an interesting intersection between the construct of politics and the very real phenomenon of death. Since many political systems are built around death (like churches and governments), what would happen when we just pulled the rug on the thing that we have built our systems around? One of the questions in the lecture was what does the novel tell us about the role of death in politics and I think that death is inherently necessary to politics. In order to progress the old systems and values that past generations hold need to pass on (die) in order for new values to come in. In this book, we see that because the old people are not dying, new people cannot exist and I think that this speaks to the statement I made above.

The next thing that I thought was funny was also from the lecture, and also about the movie Coco. In Coco, the big theme is memories and how the dead never really die as long as we remember them. In the lecture, Professor Beasley-Murray brings up the idea that art can evade death thru memory and performance. I propose that people can evade death thru memory like in Coco. Like the song from Coco “Remember Me” insinuates, as long as we remember our loved ones, then they never really are apart from us, whether in, distance or in death.

My Question for the Class: What do you guys think the role of memory is in the life after death of people?

• Jon