In Luggnagg, Gulliver learns of the Struldbrugs — people cursed with immortality. They do not stay young forever. They age. And age. And age.

The Struldbrugs are the saddest creatures in the world. They remember everything — every joy, every grief, every loss. They have buried their children, their grandchildren, their great-great-great-grandchildren. They remember the birth of cities that no longer exist and the death of empires that have been forgotten.

And they remember their own faces, from the days when they were young.

Gulliver's fantasy of eternal life dies a quiet, horrified death. When the Luggnaggians ask if he would like to become a Struldbrug, he refuses so forcefully that they think him mad.

"To live forever," he writes, "is to live in a house with no windows, where the same fire has been burning for a thousand years and will burn for a thousand more, and you cannot leave, and no one comes to visit, and the wood is always the same color of ash."

The fantasy of immortality is the fantasy of endless newness. The reality is the same — only longer.