The Shadow Canon 01: The Epic of Gilgamesh

What Do We Make of Death?

By George Smith - The Chaldean Account of Genesis, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10078917

I was twenty-five the year I lost Bethany Leidlein.

We had met in the school commons during a Sunday brunch in the summer of 2005. She was an incoming freshman who had taken a gap year after high school to assist in raising her four younger siblings. She had recently gone backpacking alone through the Scottish Highlands; photos posted on MySpace showed her peering over the prow of a ferry at twilight, her face radiating a sort of elven delight at the green-mantled hills and surrounding fog. When I told her my name, she informed me that “Boz” had been a pseudonym used by Charles Dickens. On being pressed further, she confessed that she had read every Dickens novel before the age of fifteen.

I was, as you might imagine, instantly smitten.

Bethany was disarmingly sincere, a touch naïve, old-fashioned in a way that managed to be more endearing than annoying. Homeschooled, she had spent her youth reading Sir Walter Scott and C. S. Lewis and developed literary ambitions. On a trip to the beach during those first weeks she sat in the sand reading a chunky paperback copy of The Gulag Archipelago while friends frolicked in the water. She had a habit of speaking in antiquated phrases, which gave her the air of a Victorian woman who had inadvertently stumbled into the present day through a crack in time.

In the semester that followed Bethany drew a devoted throng of admirers. Stories circulated that on a walk across campus at dusk a squirrel had come up to her and submitted to being picked up and stroked like a cat. In the week before Halloween, I and a few friends gathered in the balcony of the school chapel to listen as she read from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, giving chipper East London accents to Mr. and Mrs. Beaver. A fellow English major, she distinguished herself with her essays and was soon being asked to speak at conferences and run the school writing center.

I’ll confess that my worship of Bethany was mingled with a touch of envy (“the writer’s sin,” as Lewis called it), for in three semesters at school I hadn’t earned the praise of anyone, let alone the near-universal adulation of teachers and peers. Her warm and unassuming nature won her instant friends; I was grubby and awkward and transparent in my desire to obtain the approval of everyone. Bethany, of course, understood what was driving me. In a letter written that first Christmas, she urged me to spend less time “trying to create yourself” and more time mending my bruised heart, “scarred by rejection and neglect.” It was uncanny: we had never discussed my past, but she could see what even I couldn’t.

We largely avoided each other in the year that followed; I sensed the potential to embarrass myself if I was allowed to roam in her vicinity. Because of her influence I was beginning to realize the sort of person I wanted to be, and was vexed by the distance between my aspirations for myself and the unhappy reality. You can’t just wish yourself into maturity; the act of becoming is a slow process. And she, for her part, seemed vexed at my awkwardness and tomfoolery. Recovering her approval took an agonizingly long time and I feared it might never happen.

I left the country. I spent a semester studying in London. When I came home in the spring of my junior year, I took a class on the eighteenth-century novel. Bethany sat beside me. We began meeting up to discuss assignments; soon we were hanging out once or twice a week to read (and pray) together. She told friends she was stunned by how different I seemed since my return. Within a few months we were bosom friends, inseparable.

And in the autumn of 2012, shortly after her twenty-seventh birthday, she was dead.

The events leading up to her death have been told elsewhere; for a number of years it was widely believed she had been murdered by some fellow alumni who had formed a doomsday cult, though now it seems clear she took her own life as a result of bullying she experienced within “the Group,” as we called it. I had experienced similar levels of bullying at the hands of the Group, and had been expelled, no reasons given, shortly before her wedding.

The Group’s theology was loosely Pentecostal, and one of our core beliefs was that we were special. And, being special, we were exempt from the meaningless lives that others seemed to live. Because we were the heroes of a grand story being written, life’s slings and arrows, the random miseries that afflict ordinary Muggles, would never vex us, God’s chosen apostles. “If you’re fully operating in the will of God,” said the Group’s leader, whom Bethany had married, “you won’t die in a car accident. You can’t be killed before your work on earth is complete.” Other people might get dementia or cancer, might be suddenly gunned down during a parade or while bagging tomatoes in the produce aisle, but not us. As Bethany herself had put it: “We can’t be hurt. We’re in the center of the flame. We’re protected.”

And, until the morning of her funeral, I believed that.

My fundamentalist upbringing had not prepared me for the finality of death. Of course death was acknowledged, but only just—a temporary thing that you could escape, or even avoid, by being among the elect who are “raptured” at the second coming. In the Group we had joked about raising each other from the dead if we were killed while preaching in the Middle East (where we all planned to move as a unit once we left Kansas City). But the jokes were never just jokes. And as I stood near the coffin that morning listening to the confused chatter around me, it became clear that not everyone shared my disbelief and devastation. “She’s in a better place now.” “She’s beaming down at us.” “She spoke to me last night.” It was almost as though she hadn’t died.

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t sure what I believed. I could feel rage welling in my chest as first one and then another former friend mechanically said, “She’s so proud of us all. She is singing with the angels.” I wanted to grab them by the lapels and yell, She’s dead. She’s dead and there’s no bringing her back.

* * *

On a cold, windy morning in the autumn of 1872, George Smith made a discovery that would change his own life and the lives of many others.

Born in 1840 in Chelsea, London, at that time a working-class enclave, Smith had been apprenticed at age fourteen to Bradbury and Evans, the same printing firm that published several of Dickens’s novels. There he worked for a number of years as a banknote engraver. But being linguistically gifted and having few outlets for his budding abilities—it was difficult in those days for lower-class men and women of genius to pursue higher education—he began spending his lunch breaks at the British Museum in Russell Square, where he was soon put to work translating some of the hundred thousand cuneiform tablets that had been shipped to the museum from the ruins of King Ashurbanipal’s library in Nineveh. For cuneiform, the written language of the Sumerian peoples, had only recently been deciphered, and George Smith was one of only a handful of people in the world who could read it.

On the morning in question, Smith was seated in a second-floor room at a table piled high with tablets and fragments, attempting to see from the light coming in through a window looking out on the square—to prevent the risk of fire, only senior members of staff were permitted the use of lanterns. Most of the tablets he had examined recorded mundane matters: divination rites, financial disputes, rumors of conspiracies against long-deceased kings—things that were of merely historical interest. But the tablet before him was different. Though it was difficult to make out because a coating of “thick whitish lime-like deposit” obscured some of the text,[1] what he could see unnerved him. It was the story of a world-destroying flood sent by the gods, and of a boat built for the purpose of weathering the deluge.

Some days later when the tablet was fully translated, Smith’s initial conviction was affirmed: here lay an early version of a tale that would find its way into the pages of the Bible. Though the names and some of the incidental details differed, the Sumerians had their own flood legend, one that had been all but forgotten until that morning in the museum. “I am the first man to read that,” he said, “after more than two thousand years of oblivion.”[2]

Although its connections to the story of Noah made the discovery of the tablets front-page news the world over, it soon became clear that this Near Eastern poem, written four thousand years ago and describing events alleged to have happened a full thousand years before that, was a remarkable literary feat in its own right. The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the great stories: an adventure, a quest, the original “bromance,” and a tale of rip-roaring danger and daring that ranks alongside Beowulf and the legends of King Arthur on the list of classic works that are just a pure joy to read. C. S. Lewis defined myth as a story whose sequence of events is so powerful that it “would equally delight and nourish if it had reached me by some medium which involved no words at all,”[3] and by that definition Gilgamesh is supreme myth. It engages the attentions of old and young, as might be expected of a story involving stone men, forest monsters, underworld demons, dragon-men with scorpions’ tails and a night journey across the waters of death. But, as with any great book, what it says to us deepens and evolves with the years. In the words of the Roman historian Sallust: “These things have never happened, but are always true.”[4]

As the story begins, Gilgamesh already reigns as king in Uruk. But he is not beloved. “No son is left with his father,” the men complain, “for Gilgamesh takes them all, even the children … His lust leaves no virgin to her lover, neither the warrior’s daughter nor the wife of the noble.”[5] Young, brash and arrogant, Gilgamesh believes he has the right to deflower every woman in the city before her wedding. When this state of oppression threatens to become intolerable, the people of Uruk pray to the gods, who devise a plan.

Taking a pinch of clay and flinging it into the wilderness, the goddess Aruru fashions Enkidu. Although Enkidu is human in appearance, he doesn’t yet know it. He dwells among the beasts and gazelles, defending them from hunters, drinking the milk of goats and feasting on grass. Rumors of a savage who lives in the hills reach Gilgamesh, who contrives to tame him by sending him bread to eat, ale to drink, and a woman to love (suggesting that the rites of domestication for young men haven’t much changed in four thousand years). However, Enkidu loves no one more than Gilgamesh. As the gods had planned, the two enjoy a prolonged but good-natured tussle, at the end of which, each impressed by the other’s fighting prowess, they embrace and become fast friends. Gilgamesh abandons his tyranny and, for some time, all is well.

Together Gilgamesh and Enkidu mount an expedition into a northern forest guarded by the monster Humbaba, hoping to kill him and bring home cedars for their various building projects. (Ancient Sumeria was a deforested region, and local kings found that engaging in battle with the forest tribes that lived to their north for control of precious timber was a reliable way to win fame and honor.) The expedition succeeds; Humbaba is slain.

No longer the oppressor, Gilgamesh has won the love of many. He even catches the eye of the goddess Ishtar, who tries to seduce him, demanding his hand in marriage. Gilgamesh is unmoved, remembering the terrible fates that befell all her previous lovers once she grew weary of their company. Enraged, Ishtar releases the Bull of Heaven, which tears through the streets of Uruk slaughtering at will. Many are killed before Enkidu and Gilgamesh engage it in deadly combat. Enkidu seizes the beast by its horns while Gilgamesh stabs it with a sword between the horns and the nape, sparing many lives in the process. A wild outburst of joy envelopes the city. The two brothers ride through Uruk in triumph, in a scene with uncanny echoes of the biblical story of David and Saul. Women line the street on either side, singing in chorus, “Who is the most glorious of heroes, who is most eminent among men? Gilgamesh is the most glorious of heroes, Gilgamesh is most eminent among men.”[6]

But this sort of “ego inflation,” as Carl Jung put it, always invites reprisals from the gods. The slaying of the Bull of Heaven was a blasphemous act; it must be avenged. And what better way to punish Gilgamesh than by taking the life of his best friend? In one of the most moving sequences in literature, Enkidu now has a series of dreams foretelling his own death. He’s stricken with an illness that leaves him confined to his bed for days at a time. He can feel the life ebbing out of him. There can no longer be any doubt about what’s happening: Enkidu is dying. Gilgamesh stands vigil beside him, weeping. “Once I ran for you,” says Enkidu, “for the water of life, and now I have nothing.”[7]

Enkidu dies. His soul descends to the netherworld, from which it will never return. The grief of Gilgamesh is achingly rendered in Stephen Mitchell’s poetic retelling:

“My beloved friend is dead, he is dead,

my beloved brother is dead. I will mourn

as long as I breathe. I will sob for him

like a woman who has lost her only child.

O Enkidu, you were the axe at my side

in which my arm trusted, the knife in my sheath,

the shield I carried, my glorious robe …

O Enkidu, what is this sleep that has seized you,

that has darkened your face and stopped your breath?”[8]

“Must I die too? Must I be as lifeless

as Enkidu? How can I bear this sorrow

that gnaws at my belly, this fear of death

that restlessly drives me onward?”[9]

There are things only a person who’s grieved can understand. There are dimensions of existence to which we’re blind until touched by death. Gilgamesh has brushed the outer reaches of worldly success: a fighter, a monarch, two-thirds divine, loved by many women. Yet he never grew up until this moment. The poem is a journey through successive stages of conscious development, and here, confronted with the death of a loved one, Gilgamesh for the first time begins to ask the eternal questions: What is life? What is death? Where shall I go when I die? Will I ever see my best friend again?

* * *

Bethany’s death plunged me into a crisis of faith from which I never fully recovered. I’m not an atheist; I believe in a Creator, in the human soul and, depending on my mood, a world to come. However, I think humility behooves us to acknowledge that none of us knows, I mean really knows, what happens after death. There are hints in the sacred texts of the various faiths, in the writings of mystics, in accounts given by those who claim to have journeyed to the next world at the cusp of death. But those are only glimpses through a crack in the door, murmurs and forebodings. We see through a glass, darkly.

Or, as Ophelia put it: “Lord, we know what we are, but not what we may be.”[10]

“A 2016 study of religious participation and belief,” notes Ken Jennings, “found that, even though the number of Americans who believe in God, pray, or attend religious services has declined steeply since the 1970s, the number of us who believe in the afterlife has actually risen slightly over the same time span. Even many diehard rationalists, it seems, are reluctant to imagine that death is a final ending. All that time and complexity—for nothing? It would seem such a colossal waste.”[11] We find it hard to let go of eternity. Kurt Gödel, the twentieth century’s most esteemed mathematician, dismayed and offended colleagues by arguing privately that logic dictates a life after this one. Because humans never reach our full potential, because our lives are cut tragically short, he reasoned that there must be another world in which that potential is fulfilled. “The world in which we live,” he wrote, “is not the only one in which we shall live or have lived.” Fellow logician and professional skeptic Martin Gardner, who renounced his Christian faith at a young age and spent a long career debunking claims of miracles, UFOs and near-death visions, surprised many by confessing belief in prayer, a personal God and a world to come. “I believe,” he said, “because it consoles me.”[12]

After Bethany died I developed severe anxiety, which manifested in a fear of ceasing to exist at the moment of death. I was haunted by that line in Lewis Carroll’s poem The Hunting of the Snark: “You will softly and suddenly vanish away, and never be met with again.” It seemed too much to hope that some part of me would survive death. Though I retained a deep and abiding faith, the idea of a perfect world of infinite duration struck me as implausible. I had seen too much of this world’s horrors; and even if such a world existed, what had I done to merit never-ending bliss? Sometimes I lay awake until two or three in the morning trying to work out how a finite life could yield eternal reward. Perhaps it was true what the theologians said, that eternity, being outside of time and space, is not an endless sequence of moments but something altogether beyond our grasp. Or perhaps the pleasures of the next world are temporary, and at some point the soul’s journey ends (“for what is man,” says the preacher in Moby-Dick, “that he should live out the lifetime of his God?”[13]). Perhaps the next world, like this one, is beset with temptations and perils.

In many ancient cultures, the newly dead were imagined as traveling through strange realms of terror and testing, and the soul’s response to those tests determined the nature of its reward. The Inuit peoples warned of an icy world of perpetual storms presided over by Sedna, a fingerless, one-eyed giantess. In the “Lyke-Wake Dirge,” a famous Yorkshire ballad—recorded to haunting effect by British ensemble Mediaeval Baebes—the soul is depicted as undergoing a series of trials—traversing a narrow bridge, being buffeted by fierce winds, and so on—designed to test the quality of its deeds done on earth. If the deceased was stingy towards the poor, for example, “The winds shall prick thee” and “The fire shall burn thee to the bare bone.”[14] (Susanna Clarke nods to this tradition in her magisterial novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, when the soul of a recently deceased woman is shown “walking along a narrow path, through a mountainous and gloomy landscape”[15]). Perhaps it was the sheer abundance of such stories that prompted Jung, a student of religion and myth, to write: “I hardly think that after death we shall be spirited to some lovely flowering meadow … At least half the reports of encounters with the dead tell of terrifying experiences with dark spirits; and it is the rule that the land of the dead observes icy silence, unperturbed by the grief of the bereaved.”[16]

I’m not suggesting that we should anticipate horrors after death; only that what awaits is hidden from us, and into that void the human imagination has painted fancies both morbid and reassuring. Hamlet famously considers ending his own life, but then decides against it because “the dread of something after death, the undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns” causes him to shrink in trepidation. The silence of the dead is vast, and we are all embarking on a journey we know not where. “This world is like a hallway before the world to come,” says Pirkei Avot, an ancient Jewish text. “Fix yourself in the hallway, so that you may enter the drawing room.”[17] Whatever awaits us, death demands our attention and preparation.

What I consider one of the most beautiful passages in literature occurs in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bede was a monk and scholar living in northern England in the eighth century who sought to record the whole history of England from the time of the Romans to his own day. Midway through the book he recounts how Edwin, King of Northumbria, held a meeting with his advisors to discuss whether they should adopt the new Christian religion. In the midst of the debate, “one of the king’s chief men” stood up and spoke:

“Your majesty, when we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter’s day with your thegns and counsellors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside, the storms of winter rain or snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. Even so, man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing.”[18]

This is the reality into which we were born, and it’s hard to imagine another. Since leaving the Group with its avowed disdain for earthly joys, I’ve sought to cultivate a love for the things of this world: for bonfires and blackberry liqueur and riverside pubs, for braided Challah and the music of fourteenth-century poetry, for rain-soaked flagstones and reading in bed. The Platonists taught that all the things we love in this world find their fullness and completion in the next. I hope they’re right; it’s hard to relish the prospect of a world without things. C. S. Lewis said this was precisely the problem in trying to envision the next life, and why the thought fills us with dread: “Our notion of Heaven involves perpetual negations; no food, no drink, no sex, no movement, no mirth, no events, no time, no art.”[19] But what’s to replace those things we haven’t been told. Life is a brief respite between two great unknowns.

* * *

Getting married has a way of drawing all those anxieties back to the surface. Knowledge of your own death breeds a kind of stoic resignation; even the best of us is “quite a little fellow in a wide world after all,” and it’s hard to argue that the world would benefit from an existence extended beyond all natural bounds. But falling in love—knowing that one of you will have to bury the other—provokes a rage against the heavens of the sort that Gilgamesh must have felt when Enkidu passed away. “I am not resigned,” wrote Edna St. Vincent Millay, “to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.” I don’t relish knowing that the person seated before me, reading The Iliad as she finishes her breakfast—this unique and irreplaceable being—will one day be packed away into six feet of cold earth; will read the last book she will ever read and speak the last words she will ever speak. And when the day comes I’ll give anything to return to this present moment—the two of us, seated amiably at breakfast on a spring morning in 2025. And maybe that’s why we can’t let go of the next world. Even if I can’t believe in heaven for myself, I have to believe in it for her.

* * *

And yet, having said all that, I don’t think it’s the act of dying that truly scares us. I think it’s the fear of a wasted life.

Dickens’s A Christmas Carol surely numbers among the ten or fifteen most perfect books ever written. Rach says she feels as though the story always existed, and Dickens merely transcribed it for our benefit—which is another way of saying it’s a modern myth. The arrangement of events, the transformation of Scrooge’s character culminating in his redemption on Christmas morning—it’s the sort of book that makes you glad to be alive and able to read. And there is a passage late in the book that tends to be overlooked, but which I feel is key to the whole story.

In the fourth “stave,” Scrooge encounters the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, a gliding hooded phantom who shows him visions of a future from which he seems curiously absent. The Spirit then takes him to a room—it’s Scrooge’s own, although he doesn’t know it yet—containing a bed on which a corpse has been laid. The room is empty but for the corpse. No one comes to visit the body. No voices are raised in lament.

“The cover was so carelessly adjusted that the slightest raising of it … would have disclosed the face. He thought of it, felt how easy it would be to do, but had no more power to withdraw the veil than to dismiss the specter at his side.

“Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command, for this is thy dominion! But of the loved, revered, and honored head, thou canst not turn one hair to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is not that the hand is heavy, and will fall down when released; it is not that the heart and pulse are still: but that the hand was open, generous, and true, the heart brave, warm, and tender …

“No voice pronounced these words in Scrooge’s ears, and yet he heard them when he looked upon the bed. He thought, if this man could be raised up now, what would be his foremost thoughts? Avarice, hard dealing, griping cares? They have brought him to a rich end, truly!

“He lay, in the dark, empty house, with not a man, a woman, or a child to say he was kind to me in this or that, and for the memory of one kind word I will be kind to him.”[20]

This, I think, is the only true death: to have made the world more miserable and vicious by your presence in it; to know, perhaps, the company of toadies and sycophants but no real friends; to drive away all those who might have cared for you in your last hours, alone in a cage built of meanness and regret. We’ve all had moments when we chose cruelty for its own sake; we know the temporary satisfaction but ultimate loneliness it brought us. To make that cruelty a habit, to embrace self-isolation and hatred throughout our lives would be, I think, a kind of living death. “Nothing can harm a good man either in life or death,” said Socrates, “and his fortunes are not a matter of indifference to the gods.”[21] To die unmourned, unloved, is the ultimate indictment of a life misspent. But for those who love, there is nothing to fear in death.

* * *

And yet there are some—a growing number—who seek to escape death by whatever means.

Bryan Johnson is a tech entrepreneur living in southern California who believes, in the words of Time Magazine, that “death is optional.” To that end he takes 111 pills a day, abstains from most foods and drinks in favor of a green juice made from “spermidine, amino complex, creatine, collagen peptides, cocoa flavanols, and ceylon cinnamon” that “tastes like a foot,” and engages in a rigorous health regimen that he calls “the most significant revolution in the history of Homo sapiens.”[22] On X, formerly Twitter, he posted to much derision that he intends to found a “new religion” whose motto is “Don’t Die” and whose emblem is a snake—a weirdly fitting mascot, for reasons that will soon become clear.

Johnson is not the only plutocrat in Silicon Valley pursuing dramatic life extensions and the eventual abolition of death. A climate of fear, coupled with a contempt for the flesh, seems to have taken hold in the upper echelons of the tech world. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, political theorist Eric Voegelin warned of emergent movements such as this that would seek to deny the oldest wisdom of human existence: that humans are finite creatures, that whatever has a beginning must also have an end. It’s the wisdom of the Greek philosophers, the wisdom of Genesis—and of Gilgamesh.

As the poem nears its end, the events that follow the death of Enkidu unfold like an unhappy dream. Seeking a way to bring his beloved friend back from the dead, Gilgamesh visits the garden of the gods at the top of a high mountain. There he meets a woman named Siduri who brews ale. Siduri tries to dissuade him from his obsessive quest, but Gilgamesh can no longer be talked down. He wants immortality but, more than that, he wants reassurance that his life matters. He no longer sees the purpose of anything in a world where our names and achievements perish.

Siduri agrees to assist him in finding Utnapishtim, a man who was given immortality by the gods after surviving a flood that destroyed the rest of mankind. Gilgamesh crosses the waters of death to see Utnapishtim and explains that he seeks the restoration of Enkidu, “my brother whom I loved”:

“Because of my brother I am afraid of death; because of my brother I stray through the wilderness. His fate lies heavy upon me … He is dust and I shall die and be laid in the earth for ever.”[23]

Initially Utnapishtim is unsympathetic. But seeing the bereaved king’s persistence, he shares with him a secret. Under the water blooms a plant that grows nowhere else, a plant with the power to restore youth. Though it will prick his hands, if he manages to wrest it from the waters, while he won’t be immortal, he will be young again.

Gilgamesh does as instructed. He enters the waters and returns, wounded, with the flower of youth. Overjoyed, he begins making plans. “I will take it to Uruk of the strong walls; there I will give it to the old men to eat … and at last I shall eat it myself and have back all my lost youth.” But he makes the mistake of leaving the flower alone for a second, and a terrible thing happens:

“Gilgamesh saw a well of cool water and he went down and bathed; but deep in the pool there was lying a serpent, and the serpent sensed the sweetness of the flower. It rose out of the water and snatched it away, and immediately it sloughed its skin and returned to the well.”

The flower works as promised; the snake is made young. But once again, Gilgamesh is bereft. As he watches the last of his hopes slither away into the dust, he sits down and weeps.

And that’s where the story leaves us, for at this point the poem breaks off. Though it appears there was originally more, it’s hard to imagine a more perfect ending than the one we have. Translator N. K. Sandars says, “It is the true ending” because “it is what really happens.”[24] It is the story of us. Alone among mortal creatures we know that we’re going to die. We know that it’s coming and we’re powerless to fight it. One by one we watch our friends and loved ones go into the dark; and then, late or soon, we follow them. Men like Bryan Johnson will spend their lives bargaining with the gods, pursuing the elusive flower, but death will come for them, too. We can try to hold it at bay with calisthenics and protein shakes, or we can greet it with love and courage.

And is it foolish to hope for more? That we might wake to see “the grey rain-curtain” of this world rolled back, and beyond it, a “far green country”?[25] Never. But on this side of time we sit in the dust with Gilgamesh, grieving for those who have gone.

---

[1] Budge, Sir Ernest Alfred Wallis. The Rise & Progress of Assyriology. Martin Hopkinson & Co., 1925.

[2] Damrosch, David. The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh. Henry Holt and Company, 2006.

[3] Lewis, C. S. George MacDonald: An Anthology. HarperCollins, 2001.

[4] Schmidt, Michael. Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem. Yale University Press, 2019.

[5] Sandars, N. K. The Epic of Gilgamesh. Penguin Books, 1960, pg. 67.

[6] ibid, pg. 89.

[7] ibid, pg. 93.

[8] Mitchell, Stephen. Gilgamesh: A New Translation. Atria, 2004, pgs. 152-53.

[9] ibid, pg. 159.

[10] Hamlet, Act IV, scene v.

[11] Jennings, Ken. 100 Places to See after You Die: A Travel Guide to the Afterlife. Scribner, 2023.

[12] Gardner, Martin. The Night Is Large: Collected Essays 1938-1995. St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

[13] Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick: Or, The Whale.

[14] Wimberly, Lowry Charles. Folklore in the English & Scottish Ballads. University of Chicago, 1928.

[15] Clarke, Susanna. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Bloomsbury, 2004.

[16] Jung, Carl. “Jung on Life after Death.” The Atlantic, December 1962. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1962/12/jung-on-life-after-death/658745/

[17] Pirkei Avot, 4:16.

[18] Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Leo Sherley-Price, Trans.). Penguin Books, 1990.

[19] Lewis, C. S. The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses. HarperCollins, 1980.

[20] Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.

[21] Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairn. Bollingen, 2025.

[22] Alter, Charlotte. “The Man Who Thinks He Can Live Forever.” Time Magazine, September 20, 2023. https://time.com/6315607/bryan-johnsons-quest-for-immortality/

[23] Sandars, pg. 106.

[24] ibid, pg. 46.

[25] Tolkien, J. R. R. The Lord of the Rings. HarperCollins, 2021.