Eternal Love

By Lev Minkovsky

A moving love story with elements of sci-fi and humor and an epigraph from Nietzsche. A meditation on time and timelessness, memory and forgetting. A drama of an immortal man falling for a mortal woman. Read it if you want to learn what it is like to be immortal living amidst mortals and whether love can truly be eternal in the world where everything is transient and fleeting...

A beautiful young woman in a university town meets a man at a bus stop. She doesn't realize that he is much older than he looks, because he doesn't age. A whirlwind romance follows, and they settle in a small single-story house, their future home of many decades and the only house she will ever own. Eventually the man moves to New York City and resurrects her in his memory in a truly astonishing way.

The author created a web site dedicated to this story, eternallove.love, with a few extras including a detailed floor plan and furniture layout of the dwelling of its heroes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lev Minkovsky
• Release date: Oct 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370689385

Lev Minkovsky

Lev Minkovsky is a software engineer living in New Hampshire. He wrote his first program in 1980, in a programming language no modern computer would be able to understand. Much to his surprise, possibly as a sign of a middle-life crisis, he recently began to write in human languages as well. He is interested in subjects such as time and our relationship with it, the enormous opportunities that modern times bring, and the ever-increasing influence of technology on our lives.

Book preview

Introduction

My Dear Reader,

The story I am about to tell you is my first literary work. It came into existence in a rather unusual way.

One day, I had a very strange feeling of a terrible loss. It was as if somebody I loved gradually disappeared from my life. I was in a good mood that day, and I was not sure what could cause that emotion.

Soon afterwards, two people appeared in my consciousness, he and she. His name was Peter; she went without a name. They gradually became my very close friends, and I thought about them all the time. They were very ordinary people living very ordinary lives. They would be very surprised if they learned that I decided to write about them. Hey Lev, they would probably tell me, You might as well write about your neighbors across the street. Chances are their lives are more interesting and eventful than ours. Yet there was something a little off about them, some minor strangeness, as if a suburban soccer mom gave her daughter as a birthday present a little pet unicorn. As it transpired, he was immortal.

The consequences of this little oddity were horrible. You will learn about them from my story. I could not bring myself however to write about the worst of them. Most unfortunately,

These people do not exist!

There is an ironclad logic in this world, a strict set of requirements that determine who can and who cannot exist. All people who exist must be mortal. Peter is immortal, therefore he doesn’t exist. But she? Why did such a sorry fate befall her? She is just another woman, a face in the crowd. And she is definitely mortal. But I played a nasty trick with her. She appears in my story when she meets Peter at a bus stop. In this cruel world, people who exist can meet only people who also exist. And as soon as one meets a person who doesn’t exist, they lose their right to exist as well.

When I realized all this, I was close to desperation. I felt that I failed them, in a worse possible way. The only place where they existed was my head. If I moved to different projects or simply got distracted with a flow of life, I could forget about them and they would cease to exist, at least until I would remember about them again. And just like her, I am mortal, and when I am gone, so will they, and this time forever.

So I decided to write down their story and try to publish it. I wanted as many people as possible to get to know them and think about them at least once in awhile. I hope that this will make the night of nonexistence a little less dark for them, and maybe, just maybe they will come into existence, just a little bit, in some very figurative way.

Eternal Love

What if some day or night a demon were to creep after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, a speck of dust!

– Friedrich Nietzsche

~~~

His name was Peter; he grew up in New York City. His parents divorced when he was very young, and he was brought up by his mother, who worked long hours as a pharmacist. When the time came for him to select a college major, he chose biochemistry, mostly because it sounded more exciting and interesting than other disciplines. He studied at CUNY; his grades were unremarkable, but he liked school, all the bright kids immersed into their studies, and most of all its stable routine of taking classes, doing homework and preparing for exams.

When he graduated, the prospective employers were not impressed with what he had to offer, and he decided to go for a PhD. The only program he was accepted to was at a university in a small town somewhere in the Midwest.

His years in a graduate school were quite miserable. He was used to a constant flow of energy of a big city and felt bored and lonely without it. His academic advisor had to drag him through the entire thesis writing process, and by the defense time they were barely on speaking terms.

He then spent some time in the private industry and became fully aware that having a boss that gives him orders was not for him. As luck would have it, he found a teaching position, also in the Midwest but in a much bigger city. His new employer apparently wanted to bring in instructors with a real world experience. He liked to teach, and the students enjoyed his classes. He didn’t publish much however, and in several years his employment contract ended and was not renewed. He sent out some resumes, they all were met with a polite standard reply. Already in his 30s, disappointed and depressed, he returned to New York, where someone important hired him as a lab technician. That someone received a government grant for longevity studies, and Peter would help his team with routine portions of their work.

Peter befriended at his lab a Chinese graduate student who was obviously a genius. They would spend hours together discussing their experiments on mice, and Peter could barely keep up with the rapidity