How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures

by Sabrina Imbler

Like millions of other mortal beings, when I learned about the immortal jellyfish, I envied the animal. It wasn’t the immortality itself that I coveted but its mechanism. Our traditional notions of immortality are so languorous and passive: Jesse Tuck, the everlasting teen, sips from a magic spring and stays seventeen for eternity, just like Edward Cullen from Twilight. I grew up thinking of immortality as something won with a drink or a bite or a pill, a static and irreversible state of being. But the immortal jellyfish has no notion of these tepid forevers. Its immortality is active. It is constantly aging in both directions, always reinventing itself, bell shrinking and expanding, tentacles retreating into flesh and wriggling out again. It is not living forever but reliving forever. When the immortal jellyfish ages in reverse, its body is not choosing eternity but rejecting death, which seem to me entirely different things. And the life it chooses is not young adulthood, forever a gangly seventeen, but childhood. It grows up again.