The Physics of Immortality .
Cultures have their insistences.
Navajos, I am told, tend to leave unfinished some little detail of any work they do, just for good luck. Thus, a geometrical design will have a corner undone, or a familiar story will be told on any given occasion with a minor incident omitted. The Bolshevik regime in Russia was vehemently antireligious, yet its leaders found it perfectly natural to embalm and perpetually display the body of Lenin for all the world like the incorrupt body of a Russian saint. America too has its insistences, features of its culture that are often invisible to the natives but the most striking characteristics of the country in the eyes of foreigners. America, we know from earliest report, has always managed to be both extremely religious and implacably antimetaphysical.