Mighty and dreadful, even more so than losing money

I knew a man once who wanted to get frozen when he died so that he could be revived when they had a cure for what would kill him. He's dead now. And I know someone still alive who voluntarily undergoes extreme calorie restriction in the hope of living much longer. He's very skinny and it may work. But last Sunday Times Obituaries Section had an article on a man who really though he could defeat death.

Arakawa, a Japanese-born artist, died at age 73 of unspecified causes. He and his wife, Madeline Gins, had built houses with psychologically disorienting features that were supposed to keep you perpetually young.

From the obituary:

“This mortality thing is bad news,” Ms. Gins said by phone from her studio on Houston Street. She said she would redouble her efforts to prove that “aging can be outlawed.”

In the 1990s, the couple invested money with Bernard Madoff. After Mr. Madoff’s fraud was exposed in 2008, they were forced to lay off staff and close their office. “He pulled the rug out from under us,” Ms. Gins said at the time. But, she said this week, her husband shrugged off things as trivial as money. There was a bigger morality in play.

“It’s immoral,” Ms. Gins said, “that people have to die.”

This insolvency thing is bad news too, she might have said. We will redouble our effort to prove that bankruptcy can be outlawed. It's immoral that companies have to die.