Immortality. We all know that word and the thousand luring ideas that come with the fantasy of living an infinite amount of years. Oh, the possibilities! I could hunt for every first edition tome of my favorite poet Kahlil Gibran.

Truth be told, unless you're an alchemist or an obscure avant-garde scientist with millions of dollars of funding, the notion of eternal life is out of reach. Let me just clear something up before I get ahead of myself here, I am not referring to an immortal afterlife (if your religious convictions affirm you there is one), I am speaking of human-terrestrial-mundane immortality.

In more than one fairytale and or modern young adult novel we are always tainted with the vanity of immortality. Typically, the way that is achieved is by either eating a mermaid, finding the holy grail, or eating some magical fruit; like the Chinese peaches of immortality, the golden apples of the Norse or drinking the ambrosia of the Greeks. In the modern folkloric world, we are rather lazy in our approach to millennial immortality, ain't nobody got time to go looking for some magical item. Just find yourself a cute looking vampire and have them bite you, and boom, there you have it you will fulfill your dream of being sickly pale for the rest of eternity.

Hey, back off Twilight that was a good book!

I know that was silly, and maybe you're annoyed by it because the thought of death is terrifying and you really want to be immortal.

So how do we do that in the real world? Ehm.. its sounds impossible, and the feeble-minded will convince you that it is. Technically they are right, per science nothing is immortal. In five billion years, our sun will burst in a magnificent firework show no one will ever witness. What is more depressing is the fact that we only have another 2.8 billion years of possible earthly life before we are burnt out of existence by our king star.

Sorry, don't mean to scare you I promise. On the bright side, there is still a long time until that happens, and hopefully humanity, if it has not destroyed itself yet, will find a way to escape its unrelenting doom.

But Daniel! I won't be alive to see that! How can I reach immortality for the time before we burn off?

Alright. Alright, I'll get to it.

The first step to achieving immortality is to acknowledge our mortality. Take for example one of the most well-known figures of mythology: Achilles. Thetis, his mother, foretold that her son's fate was either to gain glory and die young or to live a long but uneventful life in obscurity. We all know what he chose...if you don't. Well, he died in the Trojan war. Achilles realized that the only way he would be remembered would be by dying first, but before doing that he needed to do something worth remembering. Just ask Troy she knows the meaning of being burnt.

But that is stupid, the whole point of immortality is to never die!

Well not always. Remember Achilles, he knew he would die. Yet he knew you would know of him.

For example, I consider myself lucky that I saw the turn of this century, to see the calendar switch from 1999 to 2000, was a moment of mass fear and excitement. I say lucky because today there is an entire generation of young people who did not, despite being only in my mid-twenties I no longer fall under the category of today's young people. In this age in life, I wonder if I will be able to see the next century, I would consider myself extremely lucky and privileged if I somehow did. Statically speaking I might just make it to this century's 60's, that is, of course, being optimistic and hoping I will not concur a life-threatening illness, die in an accident, or be murdered.

Given the fact that I am a twenty-five-year-old male, and Hispanic, group that tends to be more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes and heart conditions (the latter being already true in my case), per the World Health Organization I will die at 70.6 years of age. However, since I live in the United States, and have "better access" to health care, I will expand my longevity to 78.8 years, thus approximately placing my death around the year 2070. At that date, I will fall 30 years short of seeing the new century roll in. To quote our current president, that would be "Sad!"

Ok Daniel, you're getting weird now. Blink twice if you're being held captive against your will. You need professional help. DOCTOR PHIL! OPRAH! Somebody help!

I know all this may sound a bit morbid, but knowing that our human existence is so fragile I strongly believe that we should be self-aware of our mortalities every day. Physically, it's practically impossible to be immortal, but there is a way to reach the immortal state, one that does not rely on a physical body rather a non-physical one. Let me explain.

Yeah go ahead because I'm like "wut?"

Legends like the Akhenaten, Julius Caesar, the Buddha, even Joseph Stalin are still talked about in our society, we learn about them in school trying to understand their thought process and way of thinking, and the way we do that is by reading their work, or the works written of them. The only way to reach immortality, the only way to leave a legacy is to do something worthy of others to remember. In the context of us the writers, our words, sentences, articles, poems, books will be left behind once we pass on. That is the only way to reach the coveted title of immortals.

Recently I got a hold of a three-set volume of Dante's Devine Comedy, translated by Charles Bagot Cayleya and published in 1854. Making these three books the oldest in my library by some 163 years. The original comedy was of course written 382 years before those times were printed. The point I'm trying to make here is that despite the death of their author and subsequent translator. These words carry the immortal voices of their creators. As I read them they speak to me through the web of ages, their bodies may be gone but their memory has remained to speak forever to the readers who invade the words which formed in their minds centuries ago.

"Open are the double doors of the horizon, unlocked are its bolts." -- From the Opera Akhnanten by Philip Glass