death and eternity on a sunday afternoon

At times they look like Sherlock Arsuaga and Watson Millás, and at times, Don Arsuaga de Atapuerca and Sancho Millás. The death told by a sapiens to a Neanderthal (Alfaguara) is a sometimes funny and always exciting journey of these two galactic intellectuals into what current science knows about aging and death. But, in addition, it is the sequel to the bestseller with which they already surprised in 2021, The life told by a sapiens to a neanderthaland whose success they hope to repeat.

Did you sense that your duo would go so well?
JUAN JOSE MILES: Arsuaga yes. He from the beginning he said that this was a bomb. We had two initial meetings, and with what came out of that, I made a couple of test chapters and sent them to him. He responded enthusiastically. He said that nothing like it had ever been done and that we were doomed to success. I answered that, precisely because of that, we could be doomed to failure.
JUAN LUIS ARSUAGA: I gave him a sports simile, although it doesn’t say much to him [a Millás no le gusta nada el fútbol; a Arsuaga sí. Este es solo uno de las decenas de ejemplos que evidencian que son dos seres antagónicos, como todos los buenos tándems literarios]. With this, it could happen as with some soccer teams, where they think: “If we sign so-and-so, who scores twenty goals, and little guy, who scores another twenty, together they will score forty goals. And then they get in the way and only dial six. It could go well and add readers or subtract us from each other.
Miles: It has been very surprising, because people are used to working with labels; to read novels, essays, poetry or plays… But something like that, which isn’t exactly a novel, an essay, or an interview…

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Millás and Arsuaga in front of a portion of snails in the legendary Bar Amadeo in Madrid.

Pablo Sarabia HEARST

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In this unpublished fusion that Millás talks about, the narrative thread is carried by the journalist, while the singing voice over the action –they even visit a scrapyard to explain how the human being “wears out” more according to the kilometers traveled or a ‘ paleolithic restaurant’ to establish the importance of food in aging – is up to the paleontologist, who is the one who treasures scientific knowledge. However, Millás’s original point of view often opens unexpected paths and together they cause real fireworks. So I light the fuse, starting with Millás…

Of everything you discover in this installment, what has surprised you the most?
Miles: That all the glasses that are in a restaurant must be renewed after a year. And not because they have aged, but because they have broken. That is, all human beings, even if we did not carry intrinsic death, would die anyway because a tile would fall on us.
Arsuaga: He has an obsession with roof tiles…

Okay [intervengo intentando mediar con cierto pudor]It would be horrible if life ended in such an absurd way…
Arsuaga: That is the difference between the mentality of a scientist and that of the rest of mortals. There you have La Palma, which is a bitch and I wish no one had been there while it was happening, but the eruption of the volcano itself is very interesting. Well, something similar happens with death, which for most is a bitch, but for a scientist it is still something very interesting, which has a practical component on how to delay it or try to beat it… Why does a mouse age three years? He becomes old with all the symptoms of old age that we mammals share… And why are these spots appearing on me?
Miles: I have some advantage in those.

And knowing how it happens comforts?
Arsuaga: What’s up, it’s still a bitch. I really like dancing. I’m having a great time at this party.
Miles: For it seems to me that death has consoling aspects. I have not taken the point of life that this one has taken. It happens to me as with the desert, that there are people who find it beautiful. I don’t get the point and the same thing happens to me with life…
Arsuaga: I caught him with Sugar, sugar [la canción de The Archies suena en el hilo musical mientras tomamos un café] and I still have the same desire to dance.

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Pablo Sarabia HEARST

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“We have been living with viruses for billions of years and they do their job”, Arsuaga

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But if it were possible, if science succeeded, would you like to be able to live forever?
Arsuaga: To eternal youth I think that anyone would sign up. But to live forever being old no. I, for example, am very sorry for not having learned to surf, which must be wonderful.
Miles: To me ‘eternally’ sounds like Sunday afternoons, which are eternal. I don’t want to live forever in anything, nor do I feel any affliction for not having learned to surf. If I went back I’m sure I wouldn’t do as many things as this man, it’s only ten in the morning and look how he comes [dice señalándole] overwhelming [risas].
Arsuaga: Well, it’s just that you don’t have a huge pile of exams to correct like me. Now I’m great, because I’ve delayed the problem for two hours. And what’s worse: this afternoon my wife is taking me to see the valkyrie, Wagner’s, four hours…
Miles: Well, you put it on me worse, I don’t know why you come so happy!

Let’s go back to the tile. Is a pandemic like this a big tile?
Arsuaga: From a scientific point of view, this is no surprise. We have been living with viruses for billions of years and they do their job. It is not personal.
Miles: Yes. As Arsuaga says, it is an arms race. There is no tension there.

“Eternally it sounds like Sunday afternoons. I don’t want to live forever anything”, Millás

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So what’s extraordinary as a species is that we know we’re going to die?
Arsuaga: Yesterday I read something that we have not included in the book. It is an intellectual scoop that we are the only species that is aware that it is going to die. The rest of the species live without the anguish or continuous worry of knowing that this is over. Yesterday I was reading a study on how most primates have poor long-term planning abilities. And the author said that this is why they are not aware of death. Because what is death but something that happens in the long run? So, if we lived in the absolute present or in the very near future, death as a horizon would not worry us, it is still the last planning. In fact, in Christian philosophy all of life is a preparation for death.
Miles: Planning has its advantages and disadvantages. Mark Twain said that he had spent his life worrying about things that had not yet happened. Anticipatory worries are a sentence…
Arsuaga: We are doomed because we always put ourselves in the worst, because our mind experiments with the future, we plan different possibilities to avoid problems.
Miles: In the book I tell the case of a journalist who interviewed God through a medium and who told him: “It is that we [debían de ser muchos dioses] we had not imagined death as you live it. For us they are nothing more than transformations within life”. God accused humanity of having little sense of humor. For me, the story of every human being is one of permanent uprooting: the child cannot be born if the baby has not died, the adolescent cannot die if the child has not died. And when you are old, you abandon old age to embrace the dead. And, if you think about it, it’s amazing that after all those uprootings that are like changing your country, we maintain a kind of identity that is sewn or stitched together in some way. And why do we accept all those radical changes during our life, without complaining, and not the last one? I don’t understand it, because I’ve been sedated twice and I don’t remember being happier. You disappear, you’re not here, and it seems to me that not being here is the best thing that can happen to you in life.
Arsuaga: Well don’t worry, you’re going to get fed up.

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The death told by a sapiens to a Neanderthal

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In a way, that planning that Juan Luis was talking about is shaped throughout life. Our brain prepares us to face death, right?
Arsuaga: The continuity of the self is a neuroscience problem, also exciting and that we should deal with in our next book. The continuity of the self, in reality, is nothing more than a fantasy, a product of the mind, because objectively we are not the same, we are constantly changing. And this has implications of all kinds, including legal ones. To what extent am I the same one who committed that crime?
Miles: And, furthermore, it’s a social imposition, because I remember myself in some moments of my youth and I think: “That idiot couldn’t be me!”. So why do I have to carry it around when every cell in my body has changed? They can say it’s me, but I don’t really recognize myself.
Arsuaga: It is that our species is also the only one that has detailed memories of its life experiences, and these are what make up the idea of the self.
Miles: Wait a minute: you are alluding to memory as if memory lived inside us and it is really us who live inside memory. As if it were a prison with four walls, hitting us, because our memory is a construct and many of our memories are implanted.
Arsuaga: Indeed, but there is a way in biology to answer this, in the negative: what is the self? For the self is what you lose when you have amnesia, what you forget.

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Pablo Sarabia HEARST

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Pablo Sarabia HEARST

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And what about beyond?
Arsuaga: Science takes care of the hereafter.
Miles: For me, although I think there is nothing, fortunately, I am very seduced by stories about life beyond death. Now there are two forms of eternity: the one promulgated by the corpsists, who say that you cryogenicize your body to be eternal; and that of the transhumanists, which seduces me much more. Why don’t we find an interface capable of connecting the brain with a computer? Why shouldn’t we be able to move our brain folders there? At that moment you would have to decide at what moment in your memory, in which specific me you want to live forever. Doesn’t seem like nonsense to me…
Arsuaga: This is for the next installment, clearly.
Miles: Well, since it’s out… Although I wouldn’t decide to stay with this option either, of course, because it sounds like Sunday afternoon again.
Arsuaga: But Sunday afternoons were the guateques!

Photography assistants: Ariadna Sánchez-Albornoz and Diego Arjona /Photo Editor: Caroline Alvarez. Thanks to Aries and Casa Amadeo Los Caracoles.

*This article appears in the March 2022 issue of Esquire magazine