make other arrangements. Of course if a man does die completely at death, like a fly squashed on a window pane, then it is not necessary for him to make any arrangements. However someone who does have to make his own arrangements is likely to have difficulties; the first being the utter boredom of it all, because anything he creates will be repetitive. You have to be a god to dare to try to create heaven. Most men only try to create happiness, which is different. He may well find himself in the society described in Dante's Inferno, in which cardboard men glide past each other, recognise each other, even acknowledge each other, but where there is no contact because there is no emotion. Do not let anyone tell me that such a world does not exist, because I have come across something very like it in the legal world. Alternatively, his attempts to make arrangements may be interrupted, as Faust's were, by his hearing a voice behind him saying, “Hither to me!”
I know it sounds ridiculous to suggest that a perfectly relaxed consciousness might be able to arrest, or even reverse, the normal process of aging; but the fact is that one is not in a position to explore the problem, to discover where the truth lies, unless for the purpose of the investigation one assumes that it is true. Normally all our thoughts are conditioned by death, as I explained in Chapter 12; and if a person, whose thoughts are conditioned by death, sets out to discover whether immortality is a possibility in this world, naturally he concludes that it is not. The conclusion one arrives at in any intellectual adventure is largely overshadowed by the pessimism with which one starts. So the only practical alternative is to take a leaf out of Euclids' s book, assume that immortality is possible, and hope that if the assumption is false, it will lead to a reductio ad absurdum.
I first began to take the idea seriously myself, when I discovered the reaction of other people to it. I tried out the idea one day at lunch in the Leeds…