TIME
1 The poisoned stream of time
You can’t be happy in the stream of time, and you have no home outside it. It is the element that you swim and drown in. To be sentient is to fall into time, and to be aware of time at all is to live in exile from the present. As soon as you wake to consciousness, you cease to live in the moment, and are condemned to live in time. If you lacked the presentiment of time, you would be spared three quarters of your woe. Time may heal your wounds, but it will break your heart. We are crushed by how long our tribulations last and how soon our life will end. Our pointlessness is proved both by life’s brevity and by its length. Death will make a fittingly futile close to my futile and trivial life.
God is a timeless being who made this world of time as a means to torment his creatures.
Time may be no more than an appearance. But we are always in time, because we too are no more than appearance. If there is a real world beyond appearances, we are not the sort who could have anything to do with it.
2 Suspended between the present and the timeless
We inhabit neither the instancy of the beasts nor the timelessness of the gods. Caught between the two, we are never at home in the one time we are in.
The one real eternity is the now. And neither eternity nor the now is real for us.
A blissful afterlife would have to be timeless, not interminable, since time itself is the chief of our afflictions. But if it were timeless, how could we be fit to live in it? While if it is a drawn-out series of instants, why would we want to, or how could we bear to? We are no more made to live in the instant than we are to live for all time or outside time.
Heaven must be a timeless present. And our hope to live in it is the clearest sign that we can’t live in the present. And if we did make it to heaven, we would spend all our timeless time regretting what we missed in the past, and planning for the bliss which we hope will soon arrive.
3 Never present
If you could stay in the moment for just one moment, you might give up your dream of the life to come. It would be a bliss which you would have no need to stretch out. Or it might feel like a hell which you could not endure.
Each instant it is now or never. And it is never now for us.
We say that it’s never too late. But since we live in the future, it’s already too late.
Death can’t touch this moment. It is only the future that is in its power. But since we live in the future, we live in death. And yet we still can’t bear to think of death, and are sure that it will never come near us.
We are suspended between the futility of recurrence and the futility of evanescence. What value could an event possess, if it does no more than repeat a prior one, or if it will vanish from the world as quick as it comes into it?
The moral law is the forceps that delivers us from the here and now. It considers all our acts as causes, and traces their consequences into the time to come.
4 The prison of time
People can bear the vanity of life, because they know that they won’t have to bear it for too long. Yet most of them feel sure that it would not be vain if only it went on for ever. They are such abject prisoners of time, that they assume they would prove its worth if they could add a few more years to their sentence.
Time is the best of our possessions and the worst of our afflictions. It is both the prison and the key.
Sleep is such a relief to us, because it is a brief suspension of the torments of time.
God is the God of the living, not of the dead. That is why the living are so tormented, while the dead are at rest.
A life without end would be hell. And any heaven would have to be brief. Better a short life of misery than an unrelenting ecstasy. Our fragile bliss would soon buckle beneath the weight of all time. A soft night falls on the ones who have gained pardon. They are free to go to their rest. ‘He giveth his beloved sleep.’ The poor can at last shake off the burden of existence which has pressed so hard on them. It is the saints who are sentenced to perpetual life as a punishment for their presumption. Pray for those you love, that they might slip through God’s net and not be cast panting and flapping on the bank of forever.
5 Gone before you know it
How long the years are, and how quick they go. How short life is, and how long it lasts. It slips from your fingers before you know what you’ve got. We are here for such a brief stay. We stage a short rowdy interlude in the everlasting dumb show, and then reel headlong back into the night. Life is a brief turbulence roiling the boundless ocean of eternity.
Might not the same be said of living as Johnson said of dying, that the act of living is of no importance, it takes so short a time? How little we make of so long a life. And what brief lives the busiest of us cram into the length of our days.
Our real life fills almost as short a stretch of our being here, as our being here fills of all time.
Life lasts long enough, but each day is too short. And yet, as Colton wrote, ‘many who find the day too long think life too short.’
Life, like a bad epigram, at least makes up for in brevity what it lacks in depth.
Life lasts just long enough to show how vain it is.
6 Death and futility
The shortest-lived genius finds time to bring the amplest work to completion. Yet the lengthiest span is too short to house our yawning aimlessness. Life lasts long enough for the few who know how to put it to its right use. ‘We always have enough time, if we will but use it aright,’ as Goethe comments.
Our term on this earth is too short to waste it doing what is merely urgent and needful. As Shakespeare wrote, ‘To spend that shortness basely were too long.’
People have so short a time, that they don’t want to squander it doing what is of real worth. And the more time that they waste on a task, the more certain they become that it is not a waste of time. As time runs out, they grow more impatient with the essential, and more in thrall to the ephemeral. And as the world alters more and more hurriedly, their horizons stay as circumscribed as ever.
Old people are just like the young. They are as impatient as if they still had some urgent work to do, yet they put off life as if they were going to live for ever.
Life is a long fiasco which leaves no trace as soon as it’s done with.
7 The blessing of brevity
If life were not so short, how could we give so much time to the long search for eternal truths?
Life is too long to be happy, and too short to matter. But its fugacity sets you free to dare, and its duration gives you the scope to make some abiding thing of your daring. How could you spend it in the quest to trace its gist if it weren’t to close so soon? If it stayed longer, you would have to waste each minute to build up a solid position and prosperity. If it didn’t fly so fast, you might have more chance to find the truth, but how could you lend it a welcome?
All the best things are made on the same scale as our small hearts and short lives. Beauty dies young. Love would wear out its illusions in a few years. Works of art would lose their interest for us in time.
8 The blessing of death
How could you stand up to truth’s annihilating radiance, if your long sleep weren’t soon to swaddle and cradle you in its soothing gloom? How could you put up with the spurns and ravages of time, if time didn’t sweep you through them so expeditiously? When you know that you are doomed to die, how could you bear to live, if you weren’t drugged by your illusions? Yet how could you endure the truth, if you weren’t sure that death would spare you from enduring it for too long? We can go on living because we know that we are soon to die. But how could we go on living if we believed it for real?
9 Killing time
People want to waste time, but they don’t want to die. And yet as they go faster and faster, they make life shorter and shorter, and get farther and farther from their goal. They want to hurry it on, but they never want it to end.
We can live only in time, but the best use that we can make of our time is to kill it.
Mortals live as trivially as the gods. They are so sure that they were not born to die, that they can put off life indefinitely and fritter it away on trifles.
When your life is in danger, you do all you can to keep at bay what threatens it, till you can go back to your old ways of keeping it at bay.
10 Life is elsewhere
We live our lives in absentia. We are always elsewhere. People have to rush out of doors to chase sensations. They are never at home to the moment. ‘We look forward to living,’ Fontenelle wrote, ‘and yet we never live.’ As Kraus remarked, ‘You don’t even live once.’ And if we did have to live life even once, we might not be able to live it at all. And the way we live now is just the latest version we have found of not living.
Rather than raising the dead, Jesus should have set his mind to the far harder task of calling the living to life.
When you’re young, you dream that life must be elsewhere. But when you grow up, you come to see that it is nowhere. ‘Once I supposed,’ said Emerson, ‘that only my manner of living was superficial, that all other men’s was solid. Now I find that we are all alike shallow.’
11 The futility of waiting
Waiting is the worst and most degrading dependence. And I spend most of my life waiting for things that will never come.
We refuse to wait for anything except life. All that ties us to life takes us out of the here and now.
If life has such worth, why do we waste it by neglecting to seize it but perpetually adjourn it to some undefined date?
How could we live for this hour, when we start out as children who spend all our time waiting to grow up?
Old people think that they will be ready to die tomorrow, and the rest of us think that we will be ready to begin to live tomorrow.
I while away my hours preparing for a work which I know I will never start on. Our life is a rehearsal for a play which would not be worth putting on.
12 Living in the future
We dash into the future, straining to force it to come quicker, and hoping it will have no end. Our wants make the hours fly, and the gravity of our attachments ricochets us from one project to the next. So our later years, sped on by all our feverish schemes, pass so much more breezily than our childhood’s epic days, which seemed to go on for ever since they lacked the single purpose that would suck them into the future.
We don’t care where we have been, and we don’t know where we are. We fix our eyes on where we are on the way to. And when we get there, we still won’t know it, since we’ll be haring off to some new landing place. We are always travelling and never arriving. And yet we see no point in the mere journey.
You spend each season in a holding pattern. Always next spring or next summer or next autumn you will land at your true destination, when the sky at last clears.
The dying, like the living, are fighting to put off not death but life. They cling to life by continuing to defer it.
We have to live in the future, because we know that we are soon to die.
13 Seize the moment
Nothing but this minute is real. But that is the one time that we lack the presence of mind to live in. We can live neither for the instant nor for eternity. We will go to any length to avoid living for today. Some people even write vain exhortations to urge others to do so. May this instant go on and on receding, so that you will never have to live. It’s always just in the future that we will begin to dwell in the present.
Life is not what is now. It is what is next, and what is next never arrives. Even if we could stay in the present, there is no present to stay in. It’s past before it’s come. It’s a sliver of ice which melts before you land on it. If you want to stay in the moment, you would have to spend life leaping from one split-second moment to the next.
Dying does not interrupt our life. It sets the seal on our long work of deferring it. We are never in the moment, least of all when that moment is our last. We die trying to put off death, as we lived trying to put off life. And we fail at the one as inevitably as we succeeded at the other. We cling to life. But we would do anything sooner than live for this present hour. And that is all that life is made of.
The one sure way to prolong your life is to live it today. But all we do is truncate it by postponing it so as to pile up the means we will need to live in the present tomorrow.
14 Grinding the hours
I let the hours leak away by crushing each minute to yield its use. And by striving to squeeze the good from each moment, I drain the hour of its magic. I am penny wise and pound foolish with both time and truth.
We are always in a rush because we place no value on time.
Only the few who have great reserves of time can afford to make each second count. Those who have too little must waste it in a race to reach some goal that they have not had the patience to test the worth of.
The friction of small duties wears away our time.
RISK
15 Risk and death
Life is too precious not to hazard. ‘It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another,’ as William James said, ‘that we live at all.’ But life is now so good, that we can’t bring ourselves to risk it. And so how could we hope to do what is great? Our being is inviolate, so we can no longer gamble it for the ends that might give it meaning. We feel we have a duty to hoard and pamper and prolong it.
Would the brave risk death so lightly, if love of glory didn’t lead them to hold life so cheap? Like Yeats’s irish airman, the years to them seem ‘waste of breath.’ Death is not what they stake. It is what they win in compensation if their bet fails to pay off. ‘Oh well, at least there’s always death,’ Napoleon used to say, and kept a vial of poison in his pocket, just in case.
Death lends life a delicious irresponsibility. It makes all possible, since it makes you strong to dare, ‘finite to fail, but infinite to venture,’ as Dickinson put it. If you weren’t to lose life so soon, how could you wager it with such a light heart? The grave limits the stakes, and so sets you free to play. It’s a generous insurer that underwrites all your risks for the single down-payment of your life.
16 Death is the spur
The nearness of death makes life not worth not hazarding. If life’s so brief and death’s the end, why do anything? But since life is so brief and death is the end, why not do something perilous and glorious? Life is worth just so much as what you chance it for. Why not lay it as a wager in a game with eternal oblivion?
If you were never to die, would you not feel still more need of the undying fame won by lustrous deeds?
A god craves glory even more greedily than a hero. Would people bear their lack of ever-living fame so lightly, if they had to bear it longer than this brief lease on earth? And yet they have no time to do great things, because they live as if they were never going to die.
Birds sing because they don’t know that they are soon to die, we sing because we do. They trill each one of our moods and humours, mournful or screeching, cheeky or jubilant, chuckling or chatty.
LOSS
17 Loss on loss
Life is a losing game. Either it all leaves you as you pass through it, or it all leaves you at the end, and you have no more left to lose. It’s just loss on loss, even when you feel sure that nothing could touch you. It’s a bad bargain, which no one would go into with their eyes open.
You wait like a refugee at an abandoned station. Not one thing that you hoped for will arrive now, and nothing that has gone is coming back. You can number your days by all the things that they have torn from you.
As you age, grief and ruin swell to form the throbbing bass on top of which you carol your ecstatic melodies of desire and delight. ‘A wounded deer leaps highest,’ as Dickinson wrote.
We hoard so much, yet we never win happiness. And we forfeit so much, yet we still fail to despair. Is it more horrendous to glimpse how much we have to lose in life, or how comfortably we go on living, when we have lost so much?
Do people cherish what they have lost just to swell the significance of what they still retain? They have nothing to lose but life, and so they don’t doubt that life must be a thing of great worth.
18 The stigma of surviving
There are many things more terrible to lose than life. And how terrible that you can lose them all, and still go on living. ‘In this world,’ as Chamfort said, ‘the heart must either break or turn to brass.’ Why are we so loath to leave this world in which all that is worth keeping has long since left us? We stay in the game, because we have the gambler’s knack of recalling our one or two small strokes of good luck and dismissing all the rest. Most of us are too pleased with how much we have got to grieve at what we have lost.
We break our hearts over such mean trifles, yet we are proof against the most searing tragedies.
Each of us is smirched by the stigma of surviving, to which we give the complacent name of destiny or providence. With what subtle craft our coarse egoism convinces our grief that we have a sacred duty to go on. God, we declare, is the God of the living, not of the dead.
I know that I am one of the chosen, since I live on when the better ones, the few who deserved to survive, have met their end.
After all that agony and all that beauty, the world goes on as it has always done, brutal, distracted, unconcerned by the ruin of so much sweetness.
19 The shame of resilience
Our resilience is a reproach to us. It is a proof not of the wealth of our inner resources, but of the ferocity of our external attachments. People spring back from each of their shocks, because they are so mad for their own gains and so cold to the woes of others. They jauntily live down the loss of each principle or person that made life precious. Like Henry James’s Lord Warburton, they don’t die of it, but they do worse, they live to no purpose.
Our hearts are lightly rent and lightly mended. They are lowlands deluged by flood on flood of grief. But they dry out too soon. ‘So we have to go on alone in the night,’ Céline wrote. ‘We’ve lost our true companions, and we didn’t ask them the right question, the real one, when there was still time.’
Our inconstancy is our most constant friend. If it ever left us, we would be inconsolably bereft in this world where all things are leaving us.
We dread to lose what we took no trouble to make our own.
20 Everything to lose
Life gives you nothing, and then takes it all back again. ‘The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,’ as Tichborne wrote. We are born with nothing, and it takes us our whole life to lose it. Life is a bankruptcy court which is in constant session. In its cruel game you forfeit a thousand times more than the beggarly stake that you lay. And it’s those who get least that have the most to lose. They live on as shell-shocked tremblers amid the rubble of their bombed-out life, and are dragged through barbed wire by the unravelling catastrophe of their defeat. The longer I live, the less I own, yet the more that is torn from my grasp. ‘Life’s empty pack is heaviest,’ as Dickinson well knew.
We go through life being stripped of one worthless thing after another. And the last and most worthless of these is life.
When you’re down to your last cent, you still have everything to lose. And when you have just one hour to live, you still have your whole life in front of you. And those who have made nothing of their life still have it all to lose at the end.
DEATH AND DYING
21 Death
Why fear to die, when you have already buried such a long queue of your dead selves? It’s just the last and least valuable of them that you will soon be interring. ‘Death,’ as Hazlitt wrote, ‘only consigns the last fragment of what we were to the grave.’
You go to join the great majority by the loneliest road.
We come into the world like children waking fretful and bewildered in an unfamiliar room. And all our struggles to speak our condition are the anxious wailing of a baby trying to lull itself back to sleep. You re-enter the void having found your rightful habitation, which you still fail to recognize as your own. Life is a brief and troubled exile from your long home.
What you try to hold on to shows how soon you will have lost it all. And what you remember should leave you in no doubt how quickly you will be forgotten. The grass will stay green on your tomb long after the tears of the few who loved you have dried. ‘What love was ever as deep as a grave?’ asked Swinburne.
The dead don’t die. They go on secreting their venom through the undying enmities of those they leave behind.
22 The vanity of forever and the stain of eternity
We are nothing. And if we were immortal, we would be no more than immortal nothings. The life everlasting would stretch out the ephemeral to eternity.
The kind old earth will soon wash off the deep stain of our failure and burn up the cheap idols of our success. Death will black out the sad record of our derelictions. An afterlife would taint the whole of time with them.
We waste all our days clambering up the arduous summit of nonentity. Life is a brief transit from one eternal void to another. And when we reach our end, as Khayyam wrote, the phantom caravan will have returned to ‘the nothingness it set out from.’
Life is a bewildering riddle with an appalling solution. And the sum of all our various equations makes an invariable nought. Better not to have been set the puzzle or not to have found the answer. ‘Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive.’
Death is the state in which our nothingness can at length rest from pretending to be something.
23 Death the final victory
After such deep defeats, to die seems a victory that I dare not dream of. The one sure success that you can hope for in this dispiriting world is to get out of it. But the one drawback of being dead is that you don’t know how lucky you are. ‘For the living know that they shall die, but the dead know not any thing.’ And was it worth the trouble of being born, just to learn how much better it is to be dead? Did it repay the cost just to score a zero?
Time is the sickness that we all suffer from. And death is the cure that we can’t bear to take. Death is time’s pyrrhic triumph, which at last untangles us from the knots of its loathsome tyranny. It frees us from the outrages of time and loss. Time binds us in such coils, that dying is the one thing that can unlace them.
Death is nothing to us, as Epicurus claimed, only if we are nothing but our sensations. And if that’s the case, even the living are less than nothing.
The dying have no more tears to shed.
24 Suffering and death
What fires of affliction you have to pass through to get back to the void from which you emerged. Miles of pain still to go. After all those years of unpaid heartache, nature owes us a death.
How good of God to give us life. And how much more gracious of him to take it back so soon.
Dying is a hateful way by which to exit this hateful life. How much it still costs us to leave this life which has cost us all that we prize. Life is odious because it ends in death. And death is odious because it puts a stop to life.
If life were not so fraught with pain, how could you bear it to end? And if it weren’t soon to end, how could you put up with all its pain?
25 Dying all our lives
We are virtual particles, generated out of the void only to go spinning back to it after a brief instant of vain commotion.
The years fret us like a horrid nightmare troubling a long and dreamless sleep.
Life is a dream. But at times it is so hideous that it seems all too real.
Extinction is the worst you have to fear and the best you have to hope for.
Things last longer than we do. ‘The best vitality cannot exceed decay,’ as Dickinson wrote. A living thing is one that decomposes at a faster rate than one that is not living.
Death accompanies me as the hooded third on all my expeditions. No matter where I trek, it trails me. And where I lodge, it makes its home in me. It’s at work in me now, like ants in a nest, silent, unseen and inexorable.
Life is a gaudy mask covering the gaunt face of death.
We are all dying, some too quick, and some too slow.
We are passengers on board a deathward flight. And all we do is scramble to grab the best seats that we can for the brief hour before we crash.
26 Time to leave
You ought to treat life as a visitor. Glad to see it come, you should be still more glad to see it go.
We are all sure that we will be ready to die some tomorrow, so long as it is not this tomorrow. However late it gets, we don’t see that it’s time to go. As Nietzsche said, our last duty is to learn to die at the right time. But we can’t bring ourselves to leave till it’s too late. Why wait to droop? Jump instead. ‘When your work is done,’ Lao Tzu advised, ‘then withdraw.’ And human kind ought to do so too. It has made all the great art and thoughts that it had it in it to do.
We defer life till it’s no longer worth living, and then all we want to do is hang on to it.
People race through life, and crawl toward their end. As they have sped up life, they have drawn out death. They scarcely know that they are alive, yet they sense death approaching for years, even as they remain as gadding and restless as teenagers.
Most people now live so long, that they have already crossed the river of forgetting before they leave this world.
27 Too late
Of all the things that life fails to teach us, the last is to know when to die. We lack the courage to give up, the taste not to spoil it by going on for too long, and the self-control not to want more.
We lack the decency to die in good time. So we need to have the stolid self-possession to put up with the day-to-day indignities that our greed for life heaps on us.
The sole kind of natural death these days is likely to be an early one. Or else it’s one that technology has dragged out to such a point of debility that there’s no need to call in technology to end it.
I feel sure that I could face death boldly, if only it were not this kind of death I had to face.
28 Refusing to go
We all look on long life as one of our chief goods, but most of us now live too long for our own good.
Life at its best tastes so foul, yet we all hope to live to an age where we will get down to its sourest dregs of ill-health and imbecility. Old age is the most appropriate punishment for those who have had the temerity to live too long. But we might soon bring an even worse fate on ourselves when we find out the secret of eternal life.
Most of us claim that we would rather die than live to be too old. Yet none of us think that we are too old. Those who lead such unlovely lives can think of nothing more beautiful than that they should draw breath for one more day. Like us, life gets uglier as it grows older. And yet it still seems to us as beautiful as it ever was.
People say that they don’t want to be a burden to their loved ones, till life becomes such a burden to them, that they don’t care how much they burden others.
Old people fight to keep their shrivelled grip on what they made no use of in their green time. Like children asked to give up a toy that they had never played with, they find that they feel a sudden commitment to a skill or subject that for fifty years has held no interest for them.
29 Death be not proud
Death be not proud. You don’t bag a soul these days till it’s shrunk to a clapped-out dribbler. They go from not knowing they’re alive to not knowing that they’re dead.
What a disgusting victory over death we all now win, to live so long that we don’t see that it got the better of us long ago.
When being old comes to be a full-time job, it’s time to quit.
Old people spend half their time bemoaning the natural aches and pains of age, and the rest trying unnaturally to prolong them.
Some people will go to any length to stay alive, short of changing the habits that are killing them. And some old people are distressed to lose a tooth, when they’ll soon be losing it all.
Death grimaces most frighteningly just when life seems least worth living. I clasp life more wildly as its value melts. And I cleave to it almost as stubbornly as I do to all that threatens to scuttle it. Even those who have nothing to live for will go to great lengths just to stay alive. And even when we would rather be rid of life, we still can’t bring ourselves to let it go.
The soul dies with the body. But by a miracle of medicine many bodies now live on through the death of their souls.
Medicine is the unnatural means that panders to our natural will to prolong life long past its natural limit.
30 The justice of death
Not one thing in this world ends at the right time. It’s all abortions, untimely deaths and living corpses.
Why are we punished by being born, before we have committed any crimes? And why are we then reprieved by death, once we have done such gross ones?
You would have grounds to complain of death’s unfairness, if there were some who died and some who did not, and if you were among the ones who did not.
The good die young, sickened by how like they’ve grown to this dry conniving world. What other reparation do they get in this land of refusals? As Wordsworth wrote, it’s those whose hearts are parched as summer dust that burn to the socket.
Something unspoken goes out of the world with each one of us at our end.
31 The consolations of death
The one safe place in this world is out of it.
How sweet is death to one who is sick of running but can’t bear to sit still. And how bitter is life to one who is sick of running and yet can’t bear to die.
At times it seems so rich to die, that you regain the relish to go on with your drab life. Life derives its zest from what Whitman termed ‘the delicious nearby freedom of death.’
How sweet death’s bitterness makes each second seem. And how bright all things look in its shadow. If only I could attain in dying the grace of leaves, which float, dance and fly as they fall. But I’m too dense for such poise.
Death won’t end the things that are of true worth. And what it does end grows more precious by its ending. ‘’Tis death,’ wrote Browning, ‘that makes life live.’ The finest goods are also the frailest. Its highest aspirations make life more exhilarating and more endangered. If it were not so vulnerable, what value could it have?
32 Merciful death
Life shows us so little pity, that we have to hope that death will show us some mercy. But would life treat us so untenderly, if it didn’t know how callous we are?
‘No man should be afraid to die,’ says Fuller, ‘who hath understood what it is to live.’ Life is such an atrocious scene, that the exit from it had to be festooned with terrors, to dissuade us from departing it. God had to make dying so hard, because being dead is so easy.
The part of death that is part of life is, like the rest of life, rugged and bitter. But the part that belongs all to death is kind and full of comfort.
All lives end happily, since they all end.
33 Fighting deliverance
Death is more tender with us than we are with ourselves. It draws us gently into its welcome ocean, when we would hold back shivering and frightened on the edge. We shun it, as a rabid dog shuns water.
When did we ever know what was good for us? Death, which knows nothing, knows our own good better than we do. Why do we look for a saviour to deliver us from death? Death comes as our one sweet redeemer, to ransom us from the hell that we have made of this life. As Browne wrote, ‘We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.’
We have to hope that death will be the end of our fears, which is the best we have to hope for.
Death is our neighbour. That is why we hate it. Life is family, and so a thousand times more deserving of our fear and detestation.
Dying is a duel in which both sides win, and neither gains a thing.
We fight to put off what will free us, and fly to meet what will make us its slave. We love life and hate death, yet death gives us all that we need, while life fails to give us a thing that we want.
34 Rehearsing death
Dying is so poor a play, how could it rate a rehearsal? And living is a sickness which is not worth a laborious cure. It will heal itself soon enough. But you should at least abstain from passing it on to taintless victims. If you try, like the stoics, to get the better of your dread of dying by long meditation on it, you won’t defeat it but surrender to it before it comes.
If death is nothing, then why waste all your strength preparing for it? Why live a long funeral because your light will go out one day? How could this negligible tenure deserve the effort of such a wearisome redemption?
Only those who philosophize are truly alive, boast the philosophers. And yet to philosophize is to learn to die. And if you were ever to find the truth, you would be better off dead.
Death is the one serious and solemn thing that happens to us, and most of us are not there for it.
35 Death discloses nothing
Life shows us so few of its secrets, that we hope that dying will yield up all its last clues. But when it comes, you’ll be so busy finishing, that you’ll have no time to ponder it. And you assuredly won’t get the chance to catch its drift once it’s passed you by. Jesus or Lazarus seem to have come back no wiser from their stay in the grave. Why would you learn more by expiring than you do by nodding off to sleep?
Death has nothing to teach us. And if it did, these days when we meet it we are all too old to learn.
Like all the things that we go through, death would have to be understood backwards. But we’re not likely to get much chance to do that.
If you are lucky, death will find you before you have found out who you are. You will have turned back to dust, before you learn that this is all you have ever been.
Why would dying reveal who you authentically are, when it transforms you irrecoverably into what you are not?
Most of the courage or cowardice that we show in the face of death is due to what kind of death we meet. ‘Our steadfastness in death hangs on so little,’ as Montaigne says. ‘Its being delayed by a few hours, or having companions, make us conceive of it differently.’
36 Death is our last deception
We cower in a perpetual state of emergency, and so we submit to a permanent suppression of the truth. A spool of distracting urgencies chokes our life. And dying comes as our last crisis, to stifle the final truth. If the years have frightened you into illusion, why would the threat of dissolution embolden you to face the truth? We have fought so long to keep hold of our lies. So why would we part with them just when we need them most? And having gone through life drunk on our own self-importance, why would we sober up now, when we are most in need of dutch courage?
Death is a yawning hollow which sounds so solemn, because it echoes back to us our own hollowness.
The deathbed is our final bastion against the truth. It is the stage on which we play our last sad vaudeville. Then our epitaph is the last pious lie, which sets the seal on our life of pious lying.
Deathbed scenes with their solemnity and wise words belong to fiction and not to life.
What use have the dying for last words? It is we who live on in this world of cheap scenes that feel we must make them up.
Some people love to act the philosopher, and boast that they are reconciled to death, even as they’re doing all they can to cling to the last shreds of life.
37 Death is far from our thoughts
However near death comes to us, it keeps far from our thoughts. If we ever think of it, we do so as we think of the snow and sleet when we are warm indoors, to add to our comfort by the contrast. In its sinister gloom we still stay brightly frivolous. ‘Our thoughts always lie elsewhere,’ as Montaigne says. We dread the passage, but can’t fix our minds on the terminus.
Even those who have no more purpose in living than to stay alive never think of death. If they knew what it was, they might not be so keen to keep out of its way.
38 We think least of death
There was least need for a sage like Spinoza to urge us to think least of death. We can’t focus on it long enough to fear it. Why would we think of it when we are young and it’s so far from us? And how could we bear to think of it when we are old and it’s so close? Young people feel that they will never die because they will always be young. And the old feel that they will never die no matter how old they get.
The thought of my own death doesn’t trouble me, since it seems so far from me. And the thought of the deaths of others doesn’t trouble me, since they are so far from me. And yet even for the most self-engrossed of us another’s end seems more real and serious than our own. Theirs has the faraway resonance of fiction, while my own is as banal as life.
In the midst of life we are in death. What luck then that we are never in the midst of life.
39 In the midst of death we are in life
Our hearts are never more set on the world than when we are on the cusp of departing it, ‘insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal,’ as Shakespeare wrote of an inmate on death row. We fret more at how our corpse will be handled than at how our naked soul will fare in gaping eternity. ‘The only worry that I know they had concerned their burial,’ says Montaigne. As I drown, the sunbursts on life’s shimmering cesspool still dazzle my eyes. The noose is right now tightening round our neck, as we scan the crowd for some fresh prospect of joy. ‘The pang preceding death,’ as Goldsmith wrote, ‘bids expectation rise.’
Will dying come as our last distraction, to deflect our thoughts from the desolation of death? Do the dying, like the living, dread not the last thing but only the next thing? Do we die as we lived, perplexed, fraught with hope, not quite aware of what has befallen us? Our going will be made of the same stuff as life, trivia, banality and make-believe. ‘When we dead awaken,’ Ibsen wrote, ‘we will see that we have never lived.’
Mere living was never enough for us, and so we never really lived at all.
It’s only for those still in the midst of life that death is a poignant thought. For the dying it is one last disagreeable chore to get through.
AFTERLIFE
40 Immortal cravings
Humans are the only animals that know they will die, and so they duly conclude that they are sure to live on for ever. Each of us knows that we live for all time, since all time lasts just as long as we live. Beset by deathless yearnings, we are blessed with merely mortal capacities.
We may know and feel that we are immortal, but like most of what we know and feel, this is sure to be a lie.
Life can boast that it triumphs over death, because in this one case the loser gets to write the history.
You have died and been reborn so many times in the course of your days, that you infer that you will never die for real. As hope has lived on through the demise of each of my hopes, no doubt I will live on through my last death.
Death is the body’s revenge on the arrogant mind, which brags that, once freed from its fetid embrace, it will be reborn as the bride of eternity.
41 The eternal ego
Our belief in the life after death stems from the ego’s refusal to accept its proper limits, and the intellect’s inability to grasp the true nature of time.
We all die alone. But some of us are kept company to the last by our bright complacency and by that deathless self of ours which we trust will continue to inhabit and delight the admiring world. Our ego won’t live through our death, but it does get us through our dying, as it has got us through our lives. Most of us are sure that we are too important to die, and not even dying is enough to change our minds. We go out in a last spasm of triumphant self-satisfaction. When the end comes, some people ask, Where did it all go? But most muse smugly, How did I fit it all in?
Though you may think that being dead is nothing, you still don’t doubt that some part of you must persist to experience this nothing. If death is a sleep, there must be a sleeper.
We insist that we must be immortal, as one last vain assertion of our egoism to counter the vast blank indifference of the universe.
The living see each day how the dead are forgotten, and yet they have no doubt that they will be remembered.
42 The terror of eternity
Some people find life so sweet, that they hope it will go on for ever. And some find it so bitter, that their worst fear is that it might. This life ought to be sufficient warning not to wish for another.
Some have suffered too much in this life not to hope for a better one. And others have suffered too much not to dread a worse.
If the world to come is better than this one, it would be too good for me. And if it is worse, I would want no part in it.
Some people find peace and comfort in the hope that they will live on for all time. And some have been so bruised by life’s cruel blows, that they are soothed by the certainty of death. They know that they will then be ‘not happy, but safe from ancient sorrow,’ as Leopardi wrote. Death may cast a pall on your joys. But it shades you from being scorched by the pitiless sun of immortality. Life with the prospect of death is bad enough. Without it it would be intolerable. After all the foul slop that life has served us, who would be fool enough to ask for more? Yet more is all we want.
43 Damned to everlasting life
Immortality would be as harrowing as an unabated insomnia. One sleepless night should cure you of the yearning for eternal life.
Life has played us such filthy pranks, it may be that death won’t be the last of them. Since this life is hell, it might stretch out for all time. You may wake to find that the nightmare will have no cease. The thought that it won’t go on for ever is all that could keep a sane person going. The true sting of death would be a second life spent with the devil who made this one.
Eating of the tree of knowledge made Adam and Eve too wise to eat of the tree of life.
Death, like most good things, comes too late for many of us, but at least it does come.
44 Live beyond life
Find the one thing that you do better than living, and spend your life doing that. Living is for those who have nothing better to do. And we must believe that life has some meaning beyond it, because we know that living is not it.
The work is worth more than the life, the product is worth more than the person, the outer is worth more than the inner, the object is worth more than the intention, the execution is worth more than the conception, and making is worth more than being.
Death saves alive those who have made an ageless work and aimed at more than mere happiness. It will raise up the ones who lived beyond life. It’s not a leveller. It cuts down to their true size the distinctions that seem so large in our small lives, wealth, status and power. But it sets fast the rift dissevering the few who have done great things from the rest of us. We did no more than live, and so can do no more than die.
Our days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and all that matters is the quality of the design which it makes.
45 Eternity in the instant
Our best works die soon after us. But merely to have made them is the great thing, and ought to be enough. Baudelaire tells of a writer who threw his works into the fire. ‘What does it matter? What matters is that these works were created. They have been created. Therefore they exist.’
The work of art is like Aristotle’s god. It is pure form, actualized to the full, self-sufficient, not capable of caring, more eternal than the minds that make or contemplate it.
46 Immortality by repute
You live on in the grave as you do above it, only in the hearts of others. ‘A shade,’ says Hardy, ‘but in its mindful ones has immortality.’ You exist in life a wisp more substantially than you do in the tomb. You are a little harder to ignore. Even the gods gain their brief tenure of eternity only in the place that we give them in our minds.
One day soon, when all are quite forgotten and all the names are lost, I will be Shakespeare’s equal. His glory will take an age to catch up with my anonymity. Time, having winnowed wheat from chaff, will soon burn both in one common fire. ‘Laurel outlives not May,’ as Swinburne wrote.
Ours is the one species that can form an idea of eternity, and then shrink it to a few hundred years of fame, and then shrink that to a few years of lucrative celebrity. As Twain joked, ‘by forever I mean thirty years.’ We want to live for ever, though we don’t much mind how long forever will last.
The dead live on as they did in life, that is, as lies.
47 Our brief eternity
How droll to hear such beings of an hour bandying about big words like immortality, transcendence, spirit and the absolute, as if they bore some reference to their own brief span. ‘Immortality,’ as Hazlitt says, ‘means a century or two.’
The longest afterlife in the minds of others will stave off the oblivion of the aeons for a mere moment. It is obscurity and not glory that will last till the end of time. And the dead have reached that an hour or two before us. Remembrance lives for a bright instant. Forgetting will stretch out everlastingly. ‘For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever.’
Humanity’s lustrous exploits and memorials are spewed out of the whirlpool of all-devouring time, to be sucked back down a second later. But since we know that art is mortal and love frail, we blush to cavil when poets claim that art is eternal or makes time stand still, or that love conquers death and that what will survive of us is love. What will survive of us is so little, and soon nothing at all. Our works may make a show of defying time, but time laughs at them and will soon bring them to nought. Life is brief, art is a fraction less so. It’s not immortal, and can’t make us immortal. It seems to suspend the moment, but only for a moment.