Categorical Desire

Norazha Paiman

Bernard Williams said immortality would bore you to death, 
except you couldn’t die, 
which is the whole problem.

He called it categorical desire: 
the want that hauls you 
into tomorrow.

Finish the book. 
Kiss her again. 
See how the story ends.

But what happens when you’ve read every book twice? 
Kissed every mouth.
Seen every ending circle back to 
another beginning you didn’t ask for?

Elina Makropulos lived 342 years. 
By the end, breakfast was an insult. 
Not the eggs. The repetition.

She had buried lovers in languages that no longer exist, 
watched the word for longing go extinct in three dialects, 
and felt nothing.

The sunrise kept arriving 
like a debt collector 
who doesn’t understand you’ve already paid.

No one warns you what’s coiled inside the word forever:

Death is not the thief.

Death is the editor 
who knows 
where the sentence should

And you?

You are not afraid of dying.

You are afraid of the coffee going cold. 
The kiss becoming data. 
The novel collapsing into alphabet.
You are afraid of your own heart 

still beating 
still beating 
still beating

like a clock 
in a house 
where no one 
lives 
anymore

The Science

In Karel Čapek’s play, Věc Makropulos, Elina, kept alive by her father’s elixir, greets its expiration with relief rather than dread. Borrowing this figure, Bernard Williams introduces the concept of “categorical desires” - finite, identity-constituting wants that propel us into the future, and argues that infinite duration would systematically exhaust all categorical desires, leaving a state of profound, irreversible tedium. 

Contemporary longevity science suggests aging may become pharmacologically modifiable, raising prospects of radical life extension. Yet neuroscience indicates the capacity for sustained interest depends on dopaminergic prediction-error signals, which require genuine uncertainty and novelty to function. The philosophical implication is stark: if motivation requires unpredictability, infinite repetition would collapse the neural architecture for wanting anything at all.

The extinction of novelty operates at every scale, from neural firing to language itself. Research on semantic change documents how emotion concepts disappear when the cultural conditions sustaining them vanish. The poem’s image of “the word for longing” finds grounding in linguistic anthropology: untranslatable terms (saudade , toska, hiraeth) encode forms of wanting that exist only within specific contexts. An immortal would not merely outlive lovers, but outlive their vocabularies of desire. Death then functions as a merciful terminus.

The Poet

Norazha is a Malaysian poet who wandered into academia and never fully returned. He read English literature and linguistics at the International Islamic University Malaysia and Universiti Putra Malaysia. At Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia’s School of Liberal Studies, he teaches English and Greek and Latin in Scientific Terminology. His interdisciplinary research moves across language assessment, psychometrics, medical linguistics, classics, and philosophy of science, with current projects on computational validation of language materials, Rasch measurement in high-stakes testing, and AI anxiety among academicians and university students. He collaborates with researchers at the University of Oxford and is completing advanced training at Cambridge Assessment. His poetry appears in Substack, Poetizer, Consilience, Eye to the Telescope, Poets for Science, PhysiOdyssey, and The Sciku Project. He writes because certain questions refuse to leave him alone, and writing is the only way he knows to argue back.

Next poem: Clear Star Floods Heart by Lauren Camp