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Who is Enoch Root?    [ Rants ]

Okay, so now I'm most of the way through The Confusion, the second novel in Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and I've got Enoch Root on the brain.   Who is he?   Or, what is he?

I'm going to have to re-read Cryptonomicon now that I've stumbled on this site which goes into some depth on Enoch Root theories.   But, oddly enough, prior to stumbling on the site, I was thinking this morning:

What if Enoch simply doesn't *age* as fast as normal humans?   Completely apart from the whole angel-assuming-a-man's-body theory or sliding-through-time-a-la-Billy-Pilgrim, what if his trick is simply longevity?   As a mental exercise, say one lived a full year, then was able to roll back those physical aging effects to effectively only age, say, one day for every year lived.   Quick shower-stall math means you live 300-some times longer than a typical human, which works out to something on the order of 24K years (assuming a lifespan of 65 years).   Someone who could live that long would only age 16 physical years across 6000 chronological years of recorded history.

So then I see this passage from the Book of Enoch later today on elharo's site:   "And all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years."   Hmm, that's not altogether too far off from the age-one-day-for-a-year, but who knows how that got translated from the Hebrew.

Anyway, I'd highly recommend any of Stephenson's books as good reads.