Misery Unforeseen

About fifteen years ago, I set out to write the worst novel in the history of literature. After some verbal jesting and jousting with daughter Halle, I came up with the idea of a Native American who ages very slowly. His name was Navacocoho; he was born on July 4, 1500, near Altoona, Iowa. At the end of the story, he’s five hundred years old but looks about thirty.

The Incomparable Navacocoho is the painfully long and laborious story (500+ pages) of this singular American Indian who experiences the landing of the Pilgrims, the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, the Wright Brother’s first flight, Woodstock, the Reagan Revolution, and everything in between. It’s a reckless, convoluted, unbounded mess – a mass of words, some of which don’t exist in the English lexicon, and of misplaced phrases and elongated sentences, one of which is strung out with five thousand words before a tiny period truncates its exhausting overreach for meaning.

The book took three years to write and is one of the chief joys in my recent past. Whenever I had a free minute (or two or two hundred), I would rush to my computer and throttle up my imagination into the run-amok mode where my mind could churn out the worst excuse for historical fiction ever conceived. Tossed into the story without regard to anything are innumerable tangents designed to do nothing but bog down the reader with superfluous information guaranteed to trigger a migraine. There’s a section where the author addresses raw reader feedback, a section of short stories unrelated to anything in the book, ridiculous advertisements from the 1960s, and so much more that cannot be described without wasting time and space.

Sadly, the book was a publishing failure. Only four hardcover copies were printed, one for each of my children. Yet, none of them have read this tortuously protracted and dense book cover to cover, either from a lack of time or resolution, even though they’ve had the book for more than a decade. Perhaps the story of this incredible man is destined for the ash heap of literature, but I hope not. Maybe something profound in this concept of immortality can be harnessed for you right now. Let’s take a stab with the safety of a small plastic fork.

At the beginning of my book, Spanish conquistadors in America search feverishly for the Fountain of Youth (which doesn’t exist). Meanwhile, Navacocoho stumbles innocently upon the Shrub of Vigor (which does exist). He eats the only berry on the bush and at once becomes immortal. He will continue to age, but he will never die.

Consider the blessing of immortality. Your body never succumbs to frailty, illness, disease, injury, or death. You watch your wife age into the prime of her life and then bury her at the end of it. You observe your children grow into adulthood and eventually inter them, too. You outlive all of your friends and every person you know. You meet new friends to replace the ones you’ve lost, only to say goodbye to them after they’ve consumed all their lifelines.

After one hundred years, you have witnessed epochs in human history; in another hundred, the world might be unrecognizable from the one you saw in 2024. In a thousand years, you could have read every notable book written from the beginning of history and mastered hundreds of vocations. In ten thousand years, your massive family tree could include thousands of wives and children and more grandchildren than you care to count.

The human race may not exist in half a million years, but you will. In a billion years, the Sun will shift from a star to a red giant, expanding in size and luminosity. Long before the Sun explodes in four or five billion years, all of Earth’s water will have evaporated from the increased heat. With life on Earth at its end, you’ll be the lone witness to a wasteland that will eventually be drawn into the Sun for incineration.

At this point, you will be free to explore the universe – all seven trillion light-years across. In front of you will be a trillion galaxies with quadrillions of stars. You realize that exploring the vastness of space will take a lifetime, but you have no worries. You have more time than you need to get the job done. Once you’ve traveled to every corner of the universe, you’ll have more than enough time to do it over again, forever.

The absurdity of this exercise in immortality is apparent, but not its misery. Eternal life within this context would be a nightmare. You would have lived so long that you would have learned everything that could be learned and experienced everything that could be experienced. Then what? Unfathomable boredom. With no one with whom to share anything of your life except gas and matter, you are destined to be alone without anything new coming into view forever. Looking back to eons of time, you would have wished you had never eaten that little berry. Yet, it’s too late to go back. You yearned to live forever, and now you’re doomed to do just that.

Living forever in a finite world would indeed be miserable. What about living temporarily in an infinite world? For this ride, I’ll give you one hundred thousand years. You get one millennium after another to explore the ever-expanding universe and the never-ending increase in knowledge and experience, to discover all the mysteries of life in this universe and all other universes that exist now and those that continue to come into existence. Imagine having thirty-six million days to search the entirety of this infinite dimension of reality and all those other infinite dimensions that may exist.

Your pace to explore infinity might begin with a saunter, but eventually, it will become a harried race against the clock. You will realize you have so little time to accomplish a scope of work that is boundless – limitless – ceaseless, and hopeless. At some point in the endeavor, you will grasp its futility. You do not have enough time to delve into the fullness of endlessness. Of course, you’ll give it your best shot, but after hundreds of centuries, you’ll be exhausted. You may even give up before your time expires. You’ll wonder what’s the point. If you can’t even scratch the surface in a thousand years, why try for a hundred thousand? In the last hour of your last day, all you will be thinking about will be all that was left unknown – all the stuff you couldn’t reach. What started as an exhilarating journey ends in miserable defeat. It would have been better never to have lived than to have tasted the thrill of the chase to infinity only to run out of time.

Immortality without infinity is misery. Infinity without immortality is just as miserable. But eternity with infinity is incomprehensible ecstasy. You’ll have endless time to explore an unlimited amount of stuff.

Heaven is the colossal home to the supernatural Nucleus that has created all that exists. In this realm, there won’t be clumps of bystanders milling listlessly on meandering clouds. There won’t be constant hymn singing with a million harpists vying to be heard. There won’t be a single person asking another What should we do now? There won’t be any fatigue from exertion or lethargy. Instead, there will be perpetual energy to engage limitless creativity with unrestrained power. This is the everlasting future awaiting God’s adopted sons and daughters. A future without hunger or thirst, sleep or sickness, apathy or atrophy. A future of inconceivable contentment, unimaginable fulfillment, and unthinkable potential.

If only Navacocoho hadn’t eaten that last berry on the Shrub of Vigor. If only he had foresight about the allure of life without limits – the kind of life that is blindingly mesmerizing and compulsive, the magnetism of which can come only from a seducing charmer. Paradoxically, misery becomes the handmaiden of an unending experience that brings immeasurable regret. Only God can bridge eternity with infinity to create a life of zealous desire with overwhelming joy.

To infinity and beyond, forever.