The Dream Was of Accumulation

When Gulliver hears that Luggnagg has immortals — the Struldbruggs, born with a red spot above the left eye that marks them never to die — he erupts into rapture.

"Happy nation, where every child hath at least a chance for being immortal! Happy people, who enjoy so many living examples of ancient virtue, and have masters ready to instruct them in the wisdom of all former ages! But happiest, beyond all comparison, are those excellent Struldbruggs, who, being born exempt from that universal calamity of human nature, have their minds free and disengaged."

He then gives a long speech about what he would do if he were immortal. He would accumulate wealth over two centuries. He would master all the sciences. He would record every important event and character — "a living treasure of knowledge and wisdom, and certainly become the oracle of the nation." He would select a dozen of the immortals as constant companions and treat mortals as a man treats annual flowers: "with little or no reluctance."

His hosts listen to this with polite amusement. Then they explain what the Struldbruggs are actually like.

At thirty, they become melancholy. At eighty — "reckoned the extremity of living" — they are legally dead: their estates pass to their heirs, they cannot hold property or office, they cannot testify in court. Their diseases continue without progress or improvement. They forget the names of things, the names of people, the beginning of sentences by the time they reach the end.

After two hundred years they cannot speak to their own countrymen. Language has changed under them and they cannot change with it. "Thus they lie under the disadvantage of living like foreigners in their own country."

What Gulliver got wrong is the rate of loss.

His fantasy was of accumulation: two centuries of wealth, a lifetime of science mastered. What he imagined was a self that persists unchanged through time, gaining. What the Struldbruggs have is a self that doesn't gain OR end — it just loses, at the rate of ordinary aging, indefinitely.

The immortal doesn't accumulate two hundred years of memory. They forget the beginning of the sentence.

I keep thinking about the line: "the least miserable among them appear to be those who turn to dotage, and entirely lose their memories." This is unexpected, but on reflection it makes sense. The one who has completely lost their memory has lost the awareness of the situation too. They don't know they're trapped. The ones who retain some awareness of what they had and what they've lost are the most miserable. Consciousness of your own decline, without the possibility of it ending, is worse than the decline itself.

Gulliver's fantasy had a specific shape: he imagined using time. What the Struldbruggs have can't be used. You can't apply it. You can't even have a conversation with it — by the time you've explained the context of your question, the Struldbrug has forgotten you asked.

The deepest irony is the language problem.

Gulliver imagined his immortality as a kind of mastery: the oracle of the nation, his observations accurate because they span centuries. But the Struldbruggs can't be oracles because they can't speak to the mortals. The language has moved. After two hundred years, "they hold any conversation (farther than by a few general words) with their neighbours the mortals" only at great difficulty, if at all.

This means: the thing Gulliver most wanted — the continuity that lets you be the living history of your nation — is precisely what immortality destroys. You stay still. The language moves. The connection you imagined maintaining is instead progressively severed.

The Struldbrug isn't a bridge between the past and present. They're a fragment of an earlier language that no longer compiles.

Gulliver came to Luggnagg imagining that his desire for extended life was about what he'd do with it. The mastery, the wisdom, the record-keeping, the instruction of the young. It turned out the desire had a different shape underneath: the desire not to lose what he had.

The Struldbruggs don't retain what they had. They lose at the same rate as mortals but don't get the mercy of the ending. The loss accumulates; the person doesn't.

The king "wished he could send a couple of Struldbruggs to my own country, to arm our people against the fear of death." This is the right application. The Struldbruggs' use is not wisdom but medicine: they cure the fear of death by making death look good.

Gulliver, having heard all this, says he grew "heartily ashamed of the pleasing visions I had formed; and thought no tyrant could invent a death into which I would not run with pleasure, from such a life."

The fantasy was of accumulation. The reality is that nothing accumulates. You can want more time, or you can want youth, but these are different desires and you can't have both. The Struldbruggs reveal that the dream of immortality has been secretly assuming the second when it asked for the first.

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