EARLIER BOOKS OF MINE have explored cultural aspects of the end of human life. But what if there were no such end, no death? How would we see ourselves then? One way of forming an image of ourselves is an imaginative inquiry into what we are not, or cannot be. Philosophers have known this all along: to understand the significance of something, they experiment with the thought that it does not exist—what would follow? Human mortality is a case in point. In cultural history, and in literature in particular, there is a long-standing tradition of endeavoring to come to terms with the finite nature of human life by speculating about what immortality, life without end in “this world,” might be like. “We will know less and less what it means to be human,” claims the epigraph with which the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner José Saramago introduced his novel As Intermitências da Morte (2005; Death at Intervals, 2008), which attempted to answer the implied question or challenge by engaging in the very serious jeu d'esprit of imagining life without death: what would happen if life were “eternal” in the here and now of a small European country at the turn of the millennium?

“Time without Death” (as the title of the German translation by Marianne Gareis has it) does not last “forever” in Saramago's thought experiment, but only some seven months. Even so, the “catastrophic” social and existential disturbances it arouses in public and private life last long enough to let people of all stripes breathe a deep sigh of relief when the contretemps has finally passed and the rule of death is reinstated. However, as their lives return to normal, they are no longer the same. Living through a period of deathlessness has taught them something about themselves as ordinary mortals. But what?

Answers are suggested by literary works of the Western tradition that focus on the theme of life without end, be it the life of an individual, or a group of individuals, or an entire population. In what follows, key works of this kind are examined, not chronologically but thematically. In this manner, works of very different authors, epochs, and cultural contexts may be invited into a conversation with each other that may reveal significant variations and similarities of human self-awareness across the cultural history of the last three centuries.