Dara Horn on "Eternal Life"

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 10 July 2019

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Would you want to live forever? What would your spouse, your children, your friends mean to you if you knew you would outlive them all? Is our mortality a problem to be solved, or an indispensable ingredient in making life worth living?

These questions have long been debated by philosophers and bioethicists, but they are perhaps best explored though the medium of literature. That's exactly what bestselling novelist Dara Horn does in her latest book, Eternal Life. The book tells the tale of Rachel, a young women living in Roman-occupied Judea, who makes a trade with God: her sick child will live, but she will never die. As Rachel reflects on a lifetime of 45 marriages and hundreds of children, lived in many countries over thousands of years, she tries to understand what makes life worth living, and moves us to ponder the question along with her.

In this podcast, Dara Horn and Jonathan Silver discuss her novel. They explore the ways Eternal Life subverts age-old tropes about immortality in literature, the different ideas Rachel's entertains about the purpose of life, and how the life of this fictional woman who cannot die can help us think more profoundly about living and dying in the real world.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Transcript

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0:00.0	In 2018, Darahorn published her fifth novel, this one called Eternal Life.
0:13.3	It follows a woman named Rahel who was born in Roman-occupied Jerusalem in the days of the
0:18.8	Second Temple. At a certain point, she offers a personal vow to
0:22.8	God that in order to save the life of her ill child, she'll trade not her life, but her death.
0:29.7	So that this young and sickly son may live, Rahel will never be able to die. God accepts
0:35.7	her vow. So over the last two millennia, cycle after cycle,
0:39.7	Rachel seems to age, but then is reborn as an 18-year-old woman, in a sense free to start again,
0:45.7	to find new friendships, a new family, to have new children and live out a new life. But in another
0:51.7	sense, profoundly unfree, encumbered by the many memories of her
0:56.5	past lives. In a way, Rahel herself bears the whole consciousness of Jewish history in her
1:02.7	personal memory, having lived and loved and mothered across dozens of countries, and through
1:08.3	every moment of Jewish civilization, with all of its danger and majesty.
1:13.1	Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. This week, Darahorn joins me to discuss
1:18.9	Raquel and her new novel, Eternal Life. We think together about how Raquel's deathless longing
1:25.1	for death shapes how we think about life and its purposes.
1:29.1	We think about the connection between mortality and morality. We think about the nature of
1:33.9	parents and children. Eternal life is a superb novel, and if you haven't read it yet,
1:39.3	you might want to get a copy in order to fully enjoy this conversation. We do our best not to divulge any dimension
1:45.7	of the plot that's necessary for the novel's suspense. So feel free to listen in, even if you
1:51.3	haven't read it yet. But of course, you're going to learn a lot more from Dara if you have.
1:55.6	If you enjoy this conversation, you can subscribe to the Tikva podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify,
2:02.3	I hope you leave us a five-star review to help us grow this community of ideas. I welcome your
	...

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