Aging Backwards - The Oxymoronic Goal
Science now says it's possible... As usual fiction was way ahead.
I was treated recently to a surprise appearance by John Mulaney at a L.A. comedy club. His impromptu set featured an extended challenge of … science. Specifically, he hammered at the veritable existence of dinosaurs. I don’t think Mulaney is back on the marching powder, but it was curious to hear a man that many would term a prototype big-city-liberal-elite rail against, well, scientific facts. Wasn’t that the domain of mouth breathers who leave on Fox News as background company? Alas, it appears we all contain multitudes.
And a shit ton of cells. We can agree on that, right? We contain a multitude of those. Trillions, in fact. Some age gracefully. Some, not so much.
You’ll find endless life hacks and the latest tricks to delay dying all over this platform. Maybe it’s just my algorithm, but I can’t get away from the tips. Most are pretty basic. Like: Move around a lot. Don’t eat crap that makes you feel like crap… One could go on, but really, that’s about the long and short of it.
Some anti-aging attempts, of course, go to bizarre extremes. You might have heard of a disturbing freak named Bryan Johnson, a “tech mogul turned biohacker” who swallows down 91 supplements a day and claims to spend over $2 million a year in his maniacal efforts to beat death. Reading about his anti-aging rituals, the first thought that comes to mind is: That’s no way to live. (Irony, evidently, does not occur to Mr. Johnson…)
If you care about having an actual, you know, life, the best aging advice tends to be both accessible and benign. Dive down rabbit holes of longevity long enough and you can be excused if you emerge feeling a bit like Mulaney. Left wondering, ‘really, science? That’s all you got?’ All this research, all these advances, and the primary prescription is to exercise and eat well? Thanks.
So, instead of dressing up the obvious and calling it clever (hello, extended works of Malcolm Gladwell!), I thought it might be more interesting to dial it back and take a look at the way fiction has always been way ahead when it comes to conjuring our someday frontiers.
The notion of reversing aging, or at least halting it, has been around for about as long as humans have recorded their thoughts.
Fitzgerald’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was published in 1922. (The Brad Pitt film adaptation pictured above was released in 2008…) While this may be the 20th century’s touchstone on aging in reverse, F. Scott was far from the first to delve into this dream. Indeed, Benjamin Button feels a bit like a case of genre reappropriating. Recall the wizard Merlyn in Arthurian legend? Like little Mr. B, Merlyn was born an old man and ages in reverse. Which is rather helpful for a wizard, seeing as how it helps him ‘remember’ the future.
Of course, sticklers and / or Fitzgerald defenders may take exception here. While the Arthurian legends have been around for centuries, it was the author T.H. White who deserves credit in the bringing these tales to modern times. White’s series of novels, beginning with The Once and Future King served as an Arthurian update based on a work called Le Morte de Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. Malory’s work came out in 1485; T.H. White did not begin publishing his King Arthur cycle until 1958.
Either way, when it comes to aging backwards, these accounts are at least a couple thousand years behind the originals. The ancient Greek historian Theopompus, who lived from 380 BC - 315 BC addressed it in his writings about the fictional island of Meropis. At the furthest edge of the isle lay Anostos (land of no-return) and a pair of rivers named Grief and Pleasure. Guess which one held the promise of you aging backwards?
Theopompus wasn’t the first either. In his Statesman, Plato mused about reversing the flow of time. And it’s not as though the ancient Greeks didn’t have their own inspirations going back eons. Alas, pinning down a ‘patient zero’ origin story for aging backwards is beyond any scholarly citation. We just know these stories have always been with us. After all, what could be more human than the longing for more life?
My first exposure to the Holy Grail was either Monty Python or the third Indiana Jones movie. Both films are touchstones of my teenage years. Monty Python’s White Rabbit and “a mere flesh wound” didn’t teach me much about the Grail legend, though Indy’s Last Crusade offered a bit more insight. The Grail was said to have the power to bestow immortality - and restore one’s youth; ie reverse aging forevermore. You’ll recall there’s a hell of a catch, of course. The 1989 film is now 36 years old, so the sell-by date for spoilers is probably past, but just in case you’ve forgotten I’ll refrain from stating it here.
It will come as no surprise that the legend of the Holy Grail dates back aways. It’s believed to come from ancient Irish folklore, first appearing in print somewhere around the year 1056 in the tantalizingly named Irish story The Prophetic Ecstasy of the Phantom. The tale resonated and soon spread across the European continent, with a French poet named Chretien de Troyes receiving credit for popularizing the Grail myth with his work Perceval or the Story of the Grail.
These days the proverbial ‘Holy Grail’ is referenced less as a term for eternal life or the restoration of youth, and more as a cliché for attaining one’s ultimate goal. Be it a gold medal, a Stanley Cup, a Super Bowl, or founding a ‘unicorn’ company worth a billion plus, somewhere along the line ‘Holy Grail’ got co-opted and bastardized by the highest achievers. But isn’t that always the way…
Back to that oxymoronic goal that’s intrigued from the beginning. The dream of aging backwards. Leave it to Goodreads to compile this excellent ‘listopia’ featuring ‘characters who live / age backwards’. There are 32 works here, and I’m sure they’re missing a few. Two that jumped out with some nice blasts from my past youthful reading: Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (Roald Dahl’s underrated sequel to the ubiquitous Chocolate Factory classic…) and The Neverending Story by Michael Ende. If you’re only familiar with the (excellent) film, you won’t recall the Sassafranians, as they didn’t make it to the big screen adaption. However, in Ende’s 1979 book, these Sassafranians are creatures very much like Benjamin Button. They’re born elderly; age backwards; and eventually die as babies.
It’s all enough to make a man wonder… What’s taken science so long to catch up with tales as timeless as our capacity to imagine?
If you ask John Mulaney, he’d probably blame it on those nonexistent dinosaurs.