2023-11-26 10:51:10
In his story The Immortal, Borges tells how Marco Flaminio Rufo, military tribune of a Roman legion, drinks water from a stream in a desert country, on the verge of dying of thirst, when the barbarians were pursuing him. He later learned that it was the water that gives immortality, which he was looking for, just as the River Styx made those who bathed in it invulnerable.
When he saw in the city of the troglodytes the horrible spectacle of the immortals enduring an endless life, without finding relief in any posture, without hope of future death no matter how much they desired and imagined it, he changed his mind: he traveled to the country where he conjectured that There was another river, which returned the grace of death and oblivion.
The consumerist eternity
Modern society views death with dread, possibly because it does not expect the followinglife offered by a religion now without believers and because everyone, even the most disadvantaged, expects to sit at the banquet of consumerism, which requires being alive and shopping.
The rejection of death takes on apparently positive aspects, such as the call to “honor life,” or Spinoza’s famous conclusion that wisdom is a meditation on life “because a free man does not think regarding death.”
However, unlike animals, which live in a perpetual present, only men are certain that they are mortal, that they are “beings for death” according to Heidegger.
The conviction that dying, ceasing to perceive and self-perceive, is the end that has nothing beyond, leads to clinging to life and accepting serious illnesses and decrepitude in order to remain among the living.
Consumerism requires discarding waste, which is increasingly difficult because waste surrounds us on earth, in the air, in the seas and even in outer space with space junk.
The dead person is equated with another piece of waste, which must be gotten rid of. No ancestor worship, those were antiquities from the time of Confucius, things from religions and an old-fashioned, outdated piety.
Science, often at the service of the dominant ideology, is looking for ways to extend life in better conditions.
The experiments
Now the recommendation that comes from Yale University, one of the most prestigious in the United States, is that aging can be slowed down through an adequate, low-calorie diet.
Experiments with flies and worms showed that a low-calorie diet increases lifespan, and some time later the results were extended to humans.
The Yale researchers established a reference caloric intake among more than 200 human participants in the study. They asked some of them to reduce calorie consumption by 14 percent, while the rest continued eating as usual, and they analyzed the long-term health effects of calorie restriction, the result was that the diet helps them live longer. 10 more years.
Scientists also determined that the thymus, a gland located above the heart, ages faster than the rest of the body and reduces the production of T cells, essential in the immune system. That would be the reason why the elderly are more prone to diseases
The discovery was that following two years of experience, those who had reduced their intake by 14 percent had less fat in their thymus and more functional volume, they produced more T cells than when the study began.
There is no immortality, except that promised by those who would like to turn us into cybernetic machines, the transhumanists, who for now embody a technological fantasy that they try to turn into reality at any cost. Or perhaps, like Francisco Bacon’s phrase that Borges puts at the beginning of The Immortal, there is no news, they are all born from oblivion.
From the AIM Editorial Team.
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#Eternal #life #Health #Wellness
