CHAPTER 1

Death and Immortality

DESTINATION

Night is the morning's CanvasLarceny&mash;legacy&mash;Death,but our rapt attentionTo immortality

EMILY DICKINSON

Sooner or later, everyone ponders their mortality. It is the privilegeof youth to be oblivious to death, but the fate of old age tocontemplate oblivion. Each person searches for answers in his orher own way, but eventually all ask the same questions: How longmight I live, and why must I die? What rhyme or reason is therein aging and mortality? Long before science offered reasons, artsought a rhyme that would give meaning to the mysteries of lifeand death. Such a rhyme is hidden in a priceless and little-knownwork of medieval art that lies before the high altar of WestminsterAbbey in London, England.

Hidden for decades beneath a carpet that used to be rolledback only for the feet of a new monarch, the Great Pavement ofWestminster Abbey is a gloriously intricate mosaic floor that depictsa medieval view of the cosmos. It connects the life spans ofplants, animals, and people with the life span of the universe andthe day of judgment that would herald its end. The story told inthe Great Pavement cannot now be read on its damaged surface,but it has been reconstructed by historical and archaeological detectivework. An inscription in Latin, which ran around the foursides of the square frame that encloses the pavement, tells us thatthe mosaic was completed in "this Year of Our Lord 1272," inthe reign of King Henry III. The pope contributed to the costof its construction, and the Italian artisans who laid its dazzlingpattern brought with them to dismal London bright stones salvagedfrom ancient Roman floors: glass tesserae in cobalt blue,turquoise, red and white, and purple porphyry, the livid color ofcongealed blood. This last is the rarest of the stones in the GreatPavement, found in only one mine in Egypt that closed 500 yearsbefore the birth of Jesus.

Within the square frame is a design of four circles that flowinto one another, like giant loops formed from a single cord.Around the perimeters of the circles once ran the words:

If the reader wittingly reflects upon all that is laid down,he will discover here the measure of the primum mobile:the hedge stands for three years,add in turn dogs, and horses and men,stags and ravens, eagles, huge sea monsters, the world:each that follows triples the years of the one before.

Primum mobile refers to the outermost heavenly sphere in themedieval conception of the universe. Thus, according to the inscription,the witting reader will discover in the Great Pavementthe measure of the universe or, in other words, how long it willendure. The medieval designers of the Great Pavement knew thatdifferent animals and plants have different life spans, and theyperceived this variation as part of the grand design of the cosmositself. The linked circles in the pavement embody the idea that lifecycles are yoked together and are linked to the longevity of theuniverse. Everything was connected by application of the holynumber three, culminating in judgment day. The formula thatlinks the life spans in the pavement is three years for a hedge (beforeit is rejuvenated by cutting), tripled, which gives 3² (= 9 years)for the supposed life span of a dog; tripled again for the life spanof a horse 3³ (= 27 years), and so on up to 3 to the power 9, or19,683 years, for the duration of the primum mobile.

Nineteen thousand years must have seemed like a very longtime to a medieval cosmologist, but we now know that, lookingbackward into Earth history, it is scarcely any time at all. TheDevonian limestone in the pavement, a rock consisting mainly offossilized remains of marine creatures, is on the order of 350 millionyears old, but life has been present on Earth for ten timeslonger than that (3.5 billion years), and the planet is a billionyears older still. The universe is nearly 14 billion years old bycurrent estimates. Although today we are asking the same questionsabout time that our medieval forebears did, the answers offeredby science stretch the imagination to its very limits.

What has science to say about life spans? Why do differentspecies live for such different lengths of time&mash;a dog for maybe10 years, but a human for 80? Medieval cosmologists believedthat there was unity in the diversity of life spans because all belongedto a divinely ordered mathematical series. Does sciencehave its own unified explanation for why longevity varies, or isit just a giant heap of facts, like a pile of mosaic pieces lackingorder or design? And what of aging&mash;the dysfunctions that accumulatewith age and that terminate even the longest life? Whydo we age? Do animals and plants grow decrepit just as we do?

This book is my own mosaic in which I will piece togetherthe answers that modern science offers to these questions. Butwe will begin in Westminster Abbey because, surprisingly for amedieval church, it has much more to tell us about death and immortalitythan just the message hidden in the Great Pavement.

Westminster Abbey is where England buries her immortals.Here death and posterity inhabit the same ground, serving toremind us that great art and scientific understanding transcendmortality. In this place, as much national mausoleum as church,lies Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400), author of The Canterbury Tales.He is surrounded in Poets' Corner by memorials to WilliamShakespeare, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen,George Eliot, T. S. Eliot, Henry James, and seemingly everyother name in the canon of English literature. The walls and floorof this Valhalla are so crowded with illustrious names that there isnow an overflow into the stained-glass window above Chaucer'stomb. Oscar Wilde and Alexander Pope are among the names illuminatedin the window that lights Chaucer's grave.

But this is an English church, and therefore ironies, rebellion,and even ribaldry run through its solemn fabric like veins inmarble. In the seventeenth century, schoolboys from the adjacentWestminster College fought battles in the neglected aisles withthe jawbone of King Richard II. Later, young scholars carvedtheir names on tombs and...