Comments from The Yeti, and my responses:

On your peculiar regenerative condition.

It indeed sounds like you do not die, but rather consume fuel, which would not make you human. You could perhaps be an intelligence inhabiting a human form that was reduced to a simple parasitic state in the distant past. It would explain your comments on how you thought you were rather stupid when you first remember consciousness.

There are plenty of science fiction stories from the 60’s that theorize this kind of possibility. I could look them up if you are interested.

Other possibilities – that you are what was once perceived as a minor God, as you thought yourself for a while. The Scientologists teach that precursors to human beings were invaded by alien spirits. Perhaps they are not entirely wrong, and only a few people were. Those few are destined to wander?

You raise some interesting points; however, I am not quite prepared to abandon any claim to humanity just yet. The idea that I consume fuel and that this would be sufficient to distinguish me from humankind seems a bit rash. Let me propose that you allow me to lock you in my basement and feed you nothing but water for three weeks. I daresay you would come out of it alive, but with a noticeable loss of body mass. Would I be justified in saying that you consumed your own mass as fuel?

Do not misunderstand- I freely admit that my continued existence is in and of itself sufficient to raise suspicions as to my humanity. Add to this that I apparently cannot reproduce and I have to conclude that if this is a mutation it is a singularly unsuccessful one. While immortality might seem a desirable goal for an individual it appears it would be terribly inhibiting to a species, an evolutionary dead end.

Or perhaps anyone like you truly does just learn to lay low. With the vast amount of experience gained over time, they would seem god-like to others. Or demonic, as you have found.

Jesus Christ? Mohammed? Buddha?

Of course one might begin to remember what happens to those who step forward to show a new way for humanity. Christ the Almighty has risen? How hard would that be for you to pull off?

Or perhaps myths and scary stories.

Vlad the Impaler? Zombies? Werewolves?

No doubt a person with your peculiar talents would easily inspire stories among illiterate peasants. But what might it do to a philosopher with an ability to write and on whose writings portions of societies are created.

Why did I “lay low” for so long? It was not a conscious choice at first, just a seemingly fortuitous set of coincidences which led me to move from one situation to another in a way that served to protect me from scrutiny by those too primitive to understand my nature. I am willing to entertain the idea that at some subconscious level I was aware of the danger presented by staying too long in any one place; however, by my reckoning it was some four hundred years or more before I came to fully understand and accept my condition. This implies more than just subliminal understanding, almost a programmed response. I dislike the idea that I might be some semi-autonomous device gone slightly awry.

As to myths, scary stories, etc inspired by me, I tend to doubt I have had such influences. I recently recounted probably the most public and untidy of my exits from society and that failed to generate much in the way of folklore. Of course since I make a habit of avoiding returning to places I have dwelt in the past it is possible that I did leave such things in my wake without being aware of it. Still, I tend to discount it for as I have noted before I have steadfastly avoided bringing attention to myself. Even in those rare circumstances where people began to suspect something was odd and acted against me it was never a momentous event. In most cases I was simply banished. On occasion it was worse.

What would Voltaire, or Emerson, or Thoreau have done with this knowledge.

And if there are more of your kind, is there some impulse that leads itself to eventually outing yourself to the world – like you have just done on your blog?

You count on hiding out in the open – and I’ll respect your choice whatever it may be and never ask you, the suspense of not knowing of course being a fantastic creative engine on its own for me. Well done, Methuselah’s Daughter. Here’s to another 3500 years.
-TheYeti

As to what impulse has led to this “outing” of myself, who can truly tell? Perhaps it is a subconscious urge to self-destruction. It is certainly frightening to be so open (and believe me, I am being deliberately obfuscatory in both my replies and my recounting of events), and in all honesty I can only see bad things coming of it. Yet still, here I am.

Posted on July 11th, 2003 by Zsallia
Filed under: Immortality, Philosophy, The Past