How to Make the Best of Life: A Visionary Victorian Recipe for the Only Immortality

“We never love the memory of anyone unless we feel that he or she was himself or herself a lover.”

Even if we recognize the statistical-existential fact that death is an emblem of our luckiness, most living beings are emphatically averse to the idea of dying. Since the dawn of our species, in our poems and our psalms and our dreams of eternal life, we humans have been petitioning entropy for mercy, for exception, for a felicitous violation of the laws of physics. In prior ages, this was the tas...