Tithonus - Cultural References

Cultural References

Aldous Huxley's novel, "After Many a Summer Dies the Swan" was titled after a verse from the Lord Tennyson poem "Tithonus."

The protagonist wonders if he is like Tithonus in Book 4, Chapter 1, of Alec Waugh (brother of Evelyn Waugh)'s novel, The Loom of Youth.

An episode of the television show The X-Files titled "Tithonus" concerns a man who cheated Death, but eventually came to see his immortality as a curse rather than a gift. The man is able to "sense" death coming for people and attempts to catch the face of Death in photographs, believing that if he sees his face, he will finally die.

In the television show Doctor Who and the spin-off show Torchwood, the character Jack Harkness faces the same fate as Tithonus in that when brought back from the dead, he discovers he is now both immortal — in the sense of recovering well from being killed - and still ageing, albeit extremely slowly — perhaps over billions of years. Tithonus is referenced in the second episode of the fourth series of Torchwood, Miracle Day. When every Human on the planet becomes immortal, it is found that, while no one can die, people still age. Tithonus is used as a way of explaining this.

A reprise of the theme of immortality without eternal youth appear in Book 3 of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels where the struldbrugs are in Tithonus's predicament. The key difference being that struldbrugs are born with their condition; which is identifiable at birth, and is seen as an affliction and a warning or lesson for all those fortunate enough not to be born with the curse of immortality.