Gulliver's Travels (Swift)/Part 3/Chapter 10
from the Collection “Gulliver's Travels. Part 3”
The division of this summary into sections is editorial.
During his stay in the island kingdom of Luggnagg, Gulliver found the people polite and generous, particularly toward strangers favored by the court. He made acquaintances among the leading families and usually conversed with them through an interpreter.
Gulliver hears of the immortals
At a social gathering, a gentleman asked Gulliver whether he had seen any struldbrugs, or immortals. When Gulliver asked what he meant, the gentleman explained that, on rare occasions, a child was born with a round red mark above the left eyebrow. This was a certain sign that the child would never die.
The mark grew and changed color with age, becoming green at twelve, blue at twenty-five and black at forty-five. The gentleman estimated that there were about 1,100 struldbrugs in the kingdom, including roughly fifty in the capital and a girl born about three years earlier. Their births occurred by chance rather than in particular families, and their own children were ordinarily mortal.
Gulliver was delighted. Since the gentleman spoke Balnibarbian, a language Gulliver knew well, he could express his enthusiasm directly. He imagined the immortals as living examples of ancient virtue and teachers who could pass on the wisdom of successive ages. Gulliver exclaimed:
Happy nation where every child hath at least a chance for being immortal!
He assumed that, being free from fear of death, the struldbrugs must be exceptionally happy. He wondered why he had not seen any of these conspicuously marked sages advising the king, though he speculated that their virtue might be unwelcome at a corrupt court. He resolved to recommend them to the king and even considered accepting the king’s earlier offer of a permanent position in Luggnagg, so that he could spend his life among them.
The gentleman smiled with what Gulliver later recognized as pity for his ignorance. With Gulliver’s permission, he conveyed the remarks to the company. After the Luggnaggians had discussed them, the gentleman asked Gulliver what sort of life he would have planned if he himself had been born a struldbrug.
His imagined life without an end
Gulliver readily answered that he had often amused himself by imagining what he would do if he were powerful, and had already considered how to use an endless life. He would begin by acquiring wealth through every available means, expecting thrift and careful management to make him the richest man in the kingdom within two hundred years.
From youth he would also study the arts and sciences until his learning surpassed everyone else’s. He would keep a record of important public events, assess successive rulers and ministers impartially, and observe changes in language, customs, clothing, food and entertainment. With such knowledge and experience, he expected to become a source of wisdom for the whole nation.
Gulliver said he would avoid marrying after sixty and would live hospitably but economically. He would guide promising young men, using his own memories and observations to demonstrate the value of virtue. His closest companions, however, would be fellow immortals of various ages. He would provide homes on his estate for those who lacked money and regularly invite them to his table.
He would also admit a few exceptional mortals to his company, but imagined that long experience would teach him to bear their deaths with little regret. Gulliver compared the succession of mortal friends and their descendants to flowers in a garden:
just as a man diverts himself with the annual succession of pinks and tulips in his garden, without regretting the loss of those which withered the preceding year.
He and the other struldbrugs would exchange their records and observations, warning humanity against the gradual spread of corruption. Their advice and example might, he thought, prevent the decline in human nature that people complained of in every age.
He also anticipated the pleasure of watching empires rise and fall, cities become ruins and villages grow into royal capitals. He hoped to witness changes in rivers and coastlines, the discovery of unknown countries and reversals in the fortunes of civilized and less-developed peoples. Given enough time, he expected to see solutions to problems such as determining longitude, a machine that moved perpetually and a universal medicine. Long observation would also allow him to confirm astronomical predictions and follow the movements of comets and stars.
The gentleman challenges his hopes
When Gulliver had finished, the gentleman interpreted the substance of his speech for the others. They discussed it in their own language and laughed at his expense. The gentleman then undertook to correct the mistakes that, he said, Gulliver had made through ordinary human weakness.
The struldbrugs existed only in Luggnagg. As ambassador to Balnibarbi and Japan, the gentleman had found that people in both countries struggled to believe in them. Yet he had also observed almost everyone’s desire to prolong life, even in extreme old age. Of that reluctance to die, he said:
That whoever had one foot in the grave, was sure to hold back the other as strongly as he could.
In Luggnagg, by contrast, the constant sight of struldbrugs made people less eager for endless life. The gentleman pointed out the fault in Gulliver’s scheme: it assumed that youth, health and vigor would last forever. The real question was how someone would live indefinitely with the ordinary disadvantages of old age. He asked whether Gulliver had not seen the same general reluctance to die in his own country and on his travels.
According to the gentleman, struldbrugs behaved much like other people until about thirty, then became increasingly melancholy and dejected. He relied on their own accounts of this change, since so few were born that it was difficult to draw general conclusions from observation. By eighty, they suffered the infirmities of other old people as well as the distress of knowing they could never die.
He described them as stubborn, irritable, greedy, gloomy, vain and talkative, unable to sustain friendship or affection beyond their grandchildren. The gentleman identified the passions that chiefly governed them:
Envy and impotent desires are their prevailing passions.
They envied the pleasures, and even the vices, of the young because those pleasures were closed to them. They also envied the dead, mourning at funerals because others had reached a rest they themselves could never attain. Their memories preserved only imperfect fragments of youth and middle age; for the details of the past, the gentleman thought ordinary traditions more trustworthy. Those who lost their memories altogether seemed less miserable and attracted more pity and help, because they no longer displayed so many of the others’ unpleasant qualities.
The law and the infirmities of old age
Luggnagg’s laws treated a struldbrug as legally dead at eighty. Heirs then inherited the person’s property, while a small allowance was reserved for support; those without means were maintained at public expense. After that age, struldbrugs could hold no position of trust or profit, acquire land or leases, or give evidence in court, even in a dispute over property boundaries.
If two struldbrugs married, their marriage was dissolved when the younger reached eighty. The law regarded this as a kindness: people condemned through no fault of their own to live forever should not also be obliged to endure an endless marriage.
By ninety, the gentleman continued, they lost their hair and teeth and could no longer distinguish tastes. Their existing illnesses persisted, while their memories failed so badly that they forgot common words and the names of close friends and relatives. They could not even read for pleasure, because they could not remember the beginning of a sentence by the time they reached its end.
Changes in the language isolated them further. Struldbrugs from different periods could not understand one another, and after about two hundred years they could exchange little more than a few common words with their mortal neighbors. They thus became like foreigners in their own country.
Gulliver meets the struldbrugs
Later, friends brought Gulliver five or six struldbrugs at different times. They were of various ages, and the youngest was no more than about two hundred. Although told that he was a widely traveled visitor, none asked him about his journeys. Instead, they requested a “token of remembrance,” a discreet form of begging. Begging was forbidden because they received public support, though Gulliver observed that their allowance was very small.
He learned that people of all classes despised and hated them, and that the birth of one was considered a bad omen. Such births were carefully recorded, but the register went back no more than about a thousand years, earlier records having been lost or destroyed. To estimate an older struldbrug’s age, people asked which rulers or prominent figures the person remembered and consulted history: the last ruler remembered must have begun reigning before the struldbrug was eighty.
The sight of the immortals distressed Gulliver. In his judgment, their extreme age had given them an additional, indescribable ghastliness, more pronounced in the women than in the men. Even among a handful whose ages differed by only a century or two, he thought he could distinguish the oldest.
His desire for immortality fades
What Gulliver heard and saw greatly diminished his desire to live forever. Ashamed of the pleasant future he had imagined, he concluded:
I grew heartily ashamed of the pleasing visions I had formed, and thought no tyrant could invent a death into which I would not run with pleasure from such a life.
The king heard about the conversation and teased Gulliver, suggesting that he send a couple of struldbrugs to his own country to cure its people of their fear of death. Gulliver would willingly have borne the trouble and expense, but the kingdom’s fundamental laws forbade their removal.
Gulliver also came to approve of the restrictions placed on the struldbrugs. He reasoned that, without them, their supposed tendency toward greed would eventually allow them to accumulate the nation’s property and political power. In his view, their inability to manage that power would ruin the country.