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The time has come, the walrus said, to solve the problem of death.  God has been dead for at least a century.  Existentialism has come and gone.  Beckett ("I can't go on, I must go on"):  in his grave (just around the corner, as it turns out).  Derrida, who was obsessed by it:  gone.  Reincarnation:  not too many adepts.  Behavior therapy: is there any hope there?  Can we brainwash ourselves into believing in our immortality via the gene pool?  But eventually even the gene pool will go, and then where will we be?

Coetzee in Summertime, in a fictional-nonfictional exchange, says writing books is "a gesture of refusal in the face of time.  A bid for immortality...I mean surviving beyond one's physical demise." (page 61)  "You want people to read you after you are dead?"  "It affords me some consolation to cling to that prospect."  "Even if you won't be around to witness it?"  "Even if I won't be around to witness it."  Well, at least he's honest.  

Honest, but frankly, how much consolation is the thought of immortality via books?  Even Shakespeare has only been around for what? five centuries?  A drop in the bucket of time.

Here's the first sentence of the last text in Calvino's Palomar: "Il signor Palomar decide che d'ora in poi farà come se fosse morto, per vedere come va il mondo senza di lui."  And the penultimate:  "Decide che si metterà a descrivere ogni istante della sua vita, e finché non li avrà descritti tutti non penserà più d'essere morto."

("Mr Palomar decides that from now on he will act as if he were dead, to see how the world gets along without him.  ...He decides he will start to describe each instant of his life, and until he's done describing it all he won't think any more about being dead." )