Living Inside the Brain of a 250-Year-Old Man

I spent the last two years with a dead man. He invaded my brain and occupied it, took over all spare thoughts, worked my fingers in service of his story. I combed archives for his handwriting, read every word of his that survives, walked the streets of the cities he called home, and one night I even slept on his rocky bed, on the shore of a massive Arctic river.

The man in question is Alexander Mackenzie, an explorer, business tycoon, refugee to America, and best-selling author, who died in 1820. As other biographers of the deceased can attest, I did all but prop the man’s corpse in the corner in my attempts to bring him back to life on the page. And this process, it completely changed my perspective on writing, the reasons we do this work at all.

As my manuscript took shape, I realized that my efforts to reanimate the dead shared an unlikely kinship with one of my favorite books last year, Mark O’Connell’s To Be a Machine, about the quest to solve the tricky problem of mortality. O’Connell writes of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs trying to merge humans and computers, and in so doing, eliminate death. Our brains are “wetware,” to be copied and plugged into far less fragile “hardware.” Some call this the Singularity, a revolution of the species, and prophesize it as an urgent end state just over the horizon, achievable in the lifetimes (here is the important part) of the wealthy patrons funding the research.

True believers see the Singularity as inevitable. There is a confidence borne of past success; if you founded a tech company that made you an overnight billionaire, you might also believe you can solve any engineering problem. Because that’s all death is, in this worldview. A bug of the system, not a feature.

The actual mechanics of the Singularity, though, have always confused me. In most scenarios, engineers describe the process as uploading a person into a computer. Their memories, their desires, their speech patterns, their thoughts. Yes, it does sound like that episode of Black Mirror, where replicated people are trapped in a video game, except in the Singularity the final product is loaded into an android that walks the real world.

But creating a robotic clone is different than transferring consciousness. I am not the machine, even if the artificially intelligent machine thinks it is me. If I have an identical twin, and we share every moment together from birth, when I die I am still not my twin, even if they remember every detail of my life.

“I want to write books that outlive me; you can’t take the money with you, but you can set a book on the shelf, to be enjoyed and studied by readers yet unborn.”

I think of consciousness as the place I sit behind my eyes. If I’m not behind my eyes, then this Singular thing is a receptacle, a copy, a lifeboat for my experiences, but not me.

I write because I fear death, and so it naturally occurred to me that this process O’Connell describes, of placing one’s thoughts in a device that outlasts you, does not require a new invention. In fact, this is the purpose of some of our oldest technology: the written word.

The machine they are describing is a book.

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Ego is a necessary force in every creative person’s life—otherwise we’d leave our scribblings in the sock drawer, rather than seek publishers—and I will fess up to some of my own. I want to write books that outlive me; you can’t take the money with you, but you can set a book on the shelf, to be enjoyed and studied by readers yet unborn. And I know I am not the only one that feels this way. Jeffrey Eugenides, in his 2012 speech at the Whiting Awards (later published by The New Yorker), said we should all write like we’re already dead, and consider the needs of a future reader that has broken free of our current moment’s culture and tastes. These self-concocted delusions of grandeur can become elaborate: students using a 100th-anniversary edition to debate the beauty of your sentences, perhaps, or maybe scholars pouring through archives of your unfinished work.

But having recently given this star treatment to Alexander Mackenzie, I rediscovered the limits of this write-to-survive mantra with which I had been fooling myself.

While relatively unknown today, in his lifetime Mackenzie achieved as much literary acclaim as anyone might hope. His book, Voyages from Montreal Through the Continent of North America to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans in 1789 and 1793, was a run-away best-seller. It was translated into French, German, and Russian, read by Napoleon and President Thomas Jefferson, inspired the Lewis and Clark expedition, and swung the fate of a continent. Voyages shared a pedigree and publishing house with Samuel Johnson, and has been annotated by generations of scholars who parsed every word. Mackenzie’s collected papers have been published by Cambridge University, and his journeys across North America have been re-enacted by countless adventuring canoeists, including me in the summer of 2016.

Over 40 days, I paddled the river that now bears Mackenzie’s name, 1,100 miles to the Arctic Ocean in northern Canada. I used Voyages as a travel guide, comparing Mackenzie’s observations to my own, correlating his actions to every landmark. On July 1st, we both slept on the same rock on the same beach on the same date, 227 years apart. I spent two full years of my life trying to inhabit his mind.

But in truth, I was not studying Mackenzie himself, only his imperfect machine copy. And more to the point, while Mackenzie’s immortal repository of thoughts and ideas and experiences are alive to me, obviously they cannot be to him. I gave Mackenzie the treatment most writers dream of, mining every letter for clues to his mindset, comparing versions of his manuscript, following every footnote, consulting every scholar. But in truth, Mackenzie himself was no more alive after that examination than before.

I do not know Mackenzie’s thoughts of his book being read with such scrutiny in 200 years time. But I know that I have adjusted my own thinking on the issue.

This process has humbled my aspirations. My timelines have shortened, and I’ve tried to put aside whatever tenuous satisfaction can be taken of a book’s future state. Rather, I’m trying to engage with my writing in a more grounded, daily way. To produce work that feels less like a computer back-up, and more like an opportunity connect with the people in my life now.

In other words, less Singularity, and more human.