We all die, and many of us die horribly. Our hearts stop, our body goes cold and rigid; we are buried under the earth where our corpses bloat, go moldy, rot, become consumed by insects. It is a horrible thought and a horrifying reality. All of us, each and every one, shall die; many of us will be conscious at the moment of death and able to contemplate: yes, in the next moment--my death.

How could this be good for us? How could it be a blessing?

Well, just think of the alternative--that we never die. We are alive, we are conscious--day after day we must live, and have no choice. Like most men and women we go off to work in order to pay the rent, feed ourselves, care for our children. We will work and work, go through life in order to pay for the costs of life, day after day. It is Man’s situation to live more than he understands life, and to spend more time providing himself with the things of life than he spends enjoying them.

But let us suppose now that this somewhat meaningless, somewhat exhausting cycle of day after day, year after year, decade after decade--that it goes on and on, not for a thousand years, not for ten million years--but forever. Imagine such a world without death. Imagine the tedium, the meaningless expanse of an infinite future--it never will end, never will approach an end; we will never run out of time for anything.

What to do in such a situation? Celebrate that all those topics one wanted to study, all those areas of science and technology and history and physics--celebrate that we will have time now for them all? No! No! The whole world would be drained of any urgency or meaning, any sense of completion or finality. Imagine yourself as a novelist, cursed to write a novel without ending. Ten thousand pages added to ten thousand pages, and a hundred times this, more and more forever--a novel that will never be ended for you, and which you do not have the power to end. This is a horrifying, agonizing prospect: and this novel is your life, an infinite life.

Obviously this is a horrible proposition. With a set term to life as brief as is ours, the natural inclination is to mourn that we don’t have longer. But without death, without any end at all--now all meaning in any activity, ambition, and desire is undercut. Simple boredom is now magnified to eternal torment. Ought I to read a book to pass the time? What then? Another book and another book--forever!

Just simple consciousness in such a scheme is a painful prospect. Tell the one suffering deep depression that he will never cease being conscious--never cease to see, consume food, be alive, be in these rooms, in this city, in this world. He would yearn for unconsciousness--and we cannot truly speaking ever enjoy unconsciousness; for when asleep we are not conscious to experience it. To be conscious, to go through one’s day, to eat breakfast, grow hungry later, cook again, eat again, to read some, to work--and to go on with this, this constant conscious activity--to go on with it infinitely and eternally, without an end even coming any closer. Decade after decade, century after century, we will remain conscious, live our lives; and we never die, nor draw any closer to death. Obviously this is hell if anything ever were.

The fact of our mortality is so ingrained into our consciousness--and into our concept of “life” itself--as an evil, that we fail to perceive just how horrible it would be were we unable to ever die. Of course, death has always been terrible for us; we all wish to live long lives, and fear our end; this is integral to life as much as anything: that we do not want to die. It is a horrible prospect to be made a corpse, to rot, to lie there like so much putrid trash. But we have in fact become blind by the inescapable fact of death such that we think life, more life, life forever, could only be a blessing. Our thought says death is just about the ultimate horrible thing about life--therefore without death we could only be better off. And so Christ could merely offer us “eternal life” and we take it for granted that this is an incredible blessing. Christ did not need to waste any time convincing us that eternal life is the most blessed thing there could be; he merely said, “I offer eternal life” and nobody seemed to think this could be anything but a wonderful boon.

But immortality is something other than a wonderful boon; it is a horrible prospect, an absolute hell. Imagine day after day of work and hobby, day after day of drinking beer or indulging in some other small vice; and you will never draw closer to age, nor further from youth. You approach nothing, there is no end on the horizon; you do not live a life, you live an existence, an eternal existence. Your age matters not at all; having no finish to this world, to this existence, you do not grow any closer to anything: you merely drift. You drift, work, study, enjoy dinners--and drift, drift, drift on forever. You do not live.

You do not approach any sort of finality. Nothing has to be done and anything can be done; nothing matters; and all of this will never, never end; not in ten million years, not for an infinity. In such a word any hobby or vocation anywhere would be a senseless, profitless pursuit whose only object would be to kill time--and it will have to do so forever.

Obviously death is an incredible terror to human beings, and if it were totally taken out of the picture forever, our first moment is one of relief and rejoicing. But in the next moment we are faced with horror--an endless horizon, in which our activities and work and whatever we do in our lives: all of this becomes so much meaningless time-killing. There is nothing we need to do today that we may not do tomorrow, next week, or a thousand years from now. There is no need to hurry, nor seize the day; and nor is there anything we really ought to fill our time with that can truly be called worthwhile. For to a mortal man there are an infinity of worthwhile pursuits, and but little time to devote oneself to two or three of them; but to an immortal man, everything has become meaningless, and there is nothing that cannot be done, or is worthwhile to do to begin with.

But here we have an even worse aspect of an eternal life. Life to human beings is by nature a hidden thing. The true significance of life, the questions as to whether there is a God, the wherefores in all our existence and the ultimate meaning of it all--these are hidden from human beings in their conscious lives. We all assume that ultimately we do not know the reason for our lives or the truth of our existence; we merely live and try to live well, knowing that we will not be here eternally. The fact that we have an end of our lives on the horizon in a sense lets us put down the ultimate questions for now, and do what we must--live our lives while we are alive. With death to end it all, we are given a goal and purpose in life after all: to live and live as well as we can, for we will not always have this life, and we will not always be faced with this chance to live. And we suppose that after all there will ultimately be some answers as to why we must suffer, whether there is a God, the meaning and purpose of it all one day becoming clear to us. But to suppose that we will live as we are living now forever, eternally, an infinitude of life just the same--there are no longer any ultimate answers on the far horizon for us, there is no point beyond which we may say--rightly or wrongly--that at last the truth will be revealed. Human life is life away from the hidden truth to things, and blind to the ultimate reasons of things. If we suppose that such a life will last infinitely, without any drastic, absolute, and ultimate transformation of our selves at the end of it, then nor do we have the comfort of supposing we will someday fling aside that final veil, and find the truth to things laid bare. The ultimate truth of things is hidden from all human life, and to suppose an infinite duration of such a world--without any compete and utter threshold at the end of it beyond which we may uncover the absolute reality at last--this could only be agony, an eternal limbo. With an absolute and complete transformation at the end of things--death--we, whether rightly or wrongly, at least have some peace in the notion that the truth of things will be made plain to us, made plain at death. But an infinity of life, as we have it now? An infinity of time wherein we can be sure all of it will just be more of the same, with no complete transformation coming nor any finish of it?--Hell, hell, and hell again.