At any given moment, if a person has the opportunity to keep on
living healthily, why wouldn’t anyone take it?
One answer is boredom. The late Bernard Williams wrote a now famous paper based on The
Makropulos Case, a play by Karel Čapek, later adapted into an opera by Janáček. The central
character is known as E.M., having had several names over her lifetime with those initials. In the
sixteenth century, her father, a court physician, tried out an elixir of life on her. Now aged 342, ‘her
unending life has come to a state of boredom, indifference and coldness’. She eventually refuses to
keep taking the elixir and dies, miserable, showing that it is possible to die too late, as well as too
soon. If he lived too long, Williams concludes his paper, ‘I would eventually have had altogether too
much of myself.
living healthily, why wouldn’t anyone take it?
One answer is boredom. The late Bernard Williams wrote a now famous paper based on The
Makropulos Case, a play by Karel Čapek, later adapted into an opera by Janáček. The central
character is known as E.M., having had several names over her lifetime with those initials. In the
sixteenth century, her father, a court physician, tried out an elixir of life on her. Now aged 342, ‘her
unending life has come to a state of boredom, indifference and coldness’. She eventually refuses to
keep taking the elixir and dies, miserable, showing that it is possible to die too late, as well as too
soon. If he lived too long, Williams concludes his paper, ‘I would eventually have had altogether too
much of myself.
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