Who wants to live forever? That might sound like a question but I’m pretty sure when he sang the line, the late Freddy Mercury of Queen was making a statement. In addition, a lot of people listening to the song post-1991 are inclined to think he’d written the lyric after being diagnosed with the fatal illness that eventually took him. But that allegedly is not the case: the song was written by another member of the group in relation to other personal issues. Who wants to live forever?

In the literal sense that may be true, given the rate of decline in older age and all the accompanying indignities that come with it. In that connection, I have been a close-up witness, working for a brief while in a nursing home. It is a place that calls for a lot of fortitude both on the part of the residents and the workers. There’s a lot one is called on to bear during every 24 hours. On the other hand, when someone, like Mercury, is taken at 45, we hear folk exclaim, ‘Gone too soon!’, or ‘Snatched in his prime.’

Who wants to live forever?

In a metaphorical sense, a lot of us do. We wish to live on... not in the body, but in the mind. Of others. Immortality is something millions of us aspire towards but only a handful achieve. Writers like Dickens and Wilde, for example, will remain among the ranks of the immortals, Dickens especially for his writing and less for his personal life; Wilde as much for one as for the other. Dickens set the bar for social criticism coupled with elaborate plot structure and fictional characters who have lived on long after his own passing. David Copperfield and Uriah Heep, Oliver Twist and Fagan, Pip and Miss Havisham from Great Expectations, Scrooge and Jacob Marley from A Christmas Carol, to name but a few. Wilde, on the other hand, is remembered even today not only for his body of work but the ready humour that visited his life right to the very end when, on his death bed, with death knocking, he is alleged to have said, “Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.”

To fly away from this life on the wings of a joke is quite something when one thinks about it, especially considering the criticism Wilde faced later in life when his controversial lifestyle led to the suppression and brutal criticism of his writing, and what can hurt a writer more than that?

Like Mercury, Wilde too went early, at 46. Occasionally, it is the very controversy that causes someone to live on long after they have passed, attaining their own version of immortality. Jack the Ripper and The Boston Strangler are often spoken of in the same breath only because their crimes were so heinous both then and now. In reality, they operated in two separate centuries — the Ripper between 1888 and 1891; the Strangler in the early Sixties. There appears to be no Censorship Room in the minds of us humans. We accord people immortality for various reasons and this may have as much to do with how their actions or works have impacted on us personally, as how the media — that greatest shaping machine — has built them up.

Up until recently though, as mentioned earlier, only a handful could lay claim to immortality. Technological advances today, however, are addressing the issue. We all, it would seem, will ultimately have a chance to make or leave our mark. With video and streaming facilities at our fingertips, a lot of people are taking to recording, in advance, aspects of their lives coupled with their thoughts, bequeathing little digital memoirs, by which they may be remembered not just now but forever. The late great David Bowie’s Blackstar album suggests he was on to the potential of this facility.

Digital immortality is at hand and it behoves us to use it.