{"id":75491,"date":"2025-08-17T03:20:16","date_gmt":"2025-08-17T03:20:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/75491\/"},"modified":"2025-08-17T03:20:16","modified_gmt":"2025-08-17T03:20:16","slug":"class-issues-central-in-quest-for-immortality-winnipeg-free-press","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/75491\/","title":{"rendered":"Class issues central in quest for immortality \u2013 Winnipeg Free Press"},"content":{"rendered":"

Toward the end of the poem The Epic of Gilgamesh, the brilliant, demagogic protagonist dives down to the \u201cOcean Below\u201d to retrieve the \u201cPlant of Heartbeat\u201d that will turn him young again. Gilgamesh\u2019s best friend, the hero Enkidu, has died \u2014 not in the glory of battle, but of mundane illness.<\/p>\n

Faced with a mirror of his own ordinariness, Gilgamesh flees to the edge of the world in search of eternal life. Briefly, his quest succeeds. But on his way home, he takes a nap and a snake steals his plant. While his greatness takes him pretty far toward immortality, his everyday humanity \u2014 the need to sleep \u2014 asserts itself.<\/p>\n

American novelist Austin Taylor makes frequent reference to Gilgamesh in her debut, Notes on Infinity, which explores contemporary biotech\u2019s obsession with extending life. Taylor graduated from Harvard in 2021, majoring in chemistry and English, but she\u2019s from central Maine. Notes on Infinity, inspired by her time at the Ivy League school, captures the wonder and alienation felt by anyone outside the centre of scientific power who one day finds themselves there.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Noes
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n

Noes on Infinity<\/p>\n

Set largely on Harvard\u2019s campus, and then in Boston on Kendall Square around MIT, this energetic, observant novel follows the rise and fall of young chemistry students Zoe and Jack, who from the moment they meet form an intense bond rooted in shared brilliance.<\/p>\n

The child of a respected MIT professor, Zoe, like Gilgamesh, is ingenious, gorgeous and dissatisfied and striving \u2014 in her case, after growing up in the shadows of masculine excellence, her father\u2019s and her brother\u2019s. When she meets shaggy-haired, working-class Jack, she discovers not only an intellectual equal, but someone just as hungry.<\/p>\n

The two start as competitors and then become inseparable partners on a quest to do what has never been done before: reverse aging. Taylor sweeps up her characters in a well-rendered, exhilarating wave of money and fame, and then brings it all crashing down.<\/p>\n

Taylor beautifully conveys the excitement of intellectual delight. \u201cThere was no greater joy than to be consumed by such an obsession, to be successful in inquiry, to stretch the mind to its fullest extent in service of understanding a problem no person had ever understood before,\u201d she writes.<\/p>\n

She also beautifully conveys the danger of living in abstract \u201cgreatness.\u201d Zoe and Jack are so immersed in their rapidly growing project, there is much they don\u2019t know about each other. \u201cThey\u2019d skipped all of that to get to the deep stuff, like, How does your mind work and What do you believe in, and it\u2019d be ridiculous to go back now.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the most part Taylor\u2019s novel stays close to Zoe\u2019s perspective and its focus on the luminous Jack. However, in a move that offers the same narrative satisfaction as seeing a mystery solved, the end of the novel shifts into Jack\u2019s perspective, which takes place in rural Maine. Here Taylor\u2019s exploration of class, one of the novel\u2019s core themes, becomes more grounded. Rather than reversing aging, Taylor suggests, the real quest is knowing another person.<\/p>\n

Taylor revives Gilgamesh\u2019s wisdom in a smart, propulsive novel that feels very present. Think of our own \u201cimmortalists,\u201d like billionaires Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel, who invest millions in longevity start-ups and non-profits such as Altos Labs and The Methuselah Foundation.<\/p>\n

It can be tempting to glory in the fall of those who venture so high, but Taylor\u2019s treatment of her characters is deeply sympathetic. <\/p>\n

Despite their ambition and brilliance, Zoe and Jack are just regular people. This is what makes them fascinating.<\/p>\n

Seyward Goodhand is a Winnipeg writer and instructor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Toward the end of the poem The Epic of Gilgamesh, the brilliant, demagogic protagonist dives down to the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75492,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[353,49,48,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-75491","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75491\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}