Dialogue: I won't live forever, so I'll get on with it

By JOE BENNETT

Well, they've gone and done it now, the ones with spectacles, the ones who had the neat pencil cases at school, the ones with mudguards and wicker baskets on their bicycles, they've gone and done it now.

With their tweezers and their microscopes, they've been and gone and blown it. Never satisfied, they've pulled apart our bits and pieces in search of the elixir of life, of God's notepad, of the philosopher's stone, of the route to wealth, health and eternal happiness, the thing they choose to call the human genome and, oh dear me, they reckon they've found it.

Science, of course, is a wonderful thing. Time was when art and science ran hand in hand. Shakespeare relished every scientific advance of his time and knew nothing of any division between art and science. Both art and science meant simply knowledge.

Indeed, it wasn't until the damp romantic poets took to waltzing about the hills singing songs about daffodils that the arts and sciences went separate ways, and since then the sciences have done rather a lot more for people than the arts.

I, for one, am grateful to science for every lovely thing from penicillin to potatoes, from dentistry to e-mail. The Human Genome Project promises cures for cancer and all sorts of further delights. Bring them on, I say, and while they're at it, I am happy for them to inject soya bean genes into as many baboons as they wish in search of things that will do me good.

But there's a but. I don't want them pulling the Big Stunt, the stunt to end stunts, the stunt that fools have dreamed of since folly first came wailing from the womb, which is, oh heavens forbid, to render me immortal. Time is our element. It is where we live. Uniquely in the animal world we can conceive of a world without time. Uniquely in the animal world we are fool enough to crave it. We already have an abnormally long time to live.

Butterflies get a day or two. We get more than anything but parrots, elephants and some idler breeds of tortoise, but our rapacity and our vanity demand more. More of what? More shopping?

We live in a perpetual tension between vanity and time

But at my back I always hear

Time's winged chariot hurrying near:

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

The men in the lab coats would bring us to the deserts and leave us there to stultify in perpetuity. What can we do in 2000 years of living that we cannot do in 70?

Nothing.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time.

So said Macbeth in gloom at the prospect of a life to come which had been emptied of all meaning by his own foul deeds. Grant us an unlimited tranche of time to live our lives and Macbeth's lamentation shall be ours.

Are we to follow the example of the Californian cretins who have spent their lives gathering dollars only to find that they couldn't buy a mortgage on time? While they paid it no attention, they find that time has slipped through their fingers and left them with nothing but their bank accounts.

"This is not what we wanted; this is not what we meant at all," they squeal and they order their corpses frozen in the hope that science one day will cure their mortality and resurrect them to eternal temporal life, so they can go shopping for ever and never be made to grow up.

They are fools of the first water, solipsists every one of them, spoiled children who have run head first into the wall of truth and wept when they split their skulls.

Time kills us and is good for us. It gives the short, emphatic final answer to our overweening vanity. It ousts the tyrant that no people could dethrone and it silences the piping fool.

Man that is born of woman hath but a short to time to live, and the wise men and women of history are those who have learned to accept that truth, who have recognised that we are one with the butterflies and parrots, with the tortoises and trees, and who have then got on with it.

It is in that middle state that we live. It is that tension between our vanity and our mortality which requires us to grow wise and which makes sense of our lives.

Take time away and we are left with endless nonsense.