life

Forget the “Light at the End.” What Happens in the Meantime?

November 4, 2022 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “ESA (East Side Access) 6988,” posted to the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Flickr account (photographer: Patrick Cashin) and modified, by me, in accord with the Creative Commons license they offer — thank you!]

From whiskey river, late last week — an uncharacteristically lengthy quotation, from a favorite author (of mine as well as whiskey river itself):

The real problem here is that we’re all dying. All of us. Every day the cells weaken and the fibres stretch and the heart gets closer to its last beat. The real cost of living is dying, and we’re spending days like millionaires: a week here, a month there, casually spunked until all you have left are the two pennies on your eyes.

Personally, I like the fact we’re going to die. There’s nothing more exhilarating than waking up every morning and going “WOW! THIS IS IT! THIS IS REALLY IT!” It focuses the mind wonderfully. It makes you love vividly, work intensely, and realize that, in the scheme of things, you really don’t have time to sit on the sofa in your pants watching Homes Under the Hammer.

Death is not a release, but an incentive. The more focused you are on your death, the more righteously you live your life. My traditional closing-time rant—after the one where I cry that they closed that amazing chippy on Tollington Road; the one that did the pickled eggs—is that humans still believe in an afterlife. I genuinely think it’s the biggest philosophical problem the earth faces. Even avowedly non-religious people think they’ll be meeting up with nana and their dead dog, Crackers, when they finally keel over. Everyone thinks they’re getting a harp.

But believing in an afterlife totally negates your current existence. It’s like an insidious and destabilizing mental illness. Underneath every day—every action, every word—you think it doesn’t really matter if you screw up this time around because you can just sort it all out in paradise. You make it up with your parents, and become a better person and lose that final stone in heaven. And learn how to speak French. You’ll have time, after all! It’s eternity! And you’ll have wings, and it’ll be sunny! So, really, who cares what you do now? This is really just some lacklustre waiting room you’re only going to be in for 20 minutes, during which you will have no wings at all, and are forced to walk around, on your feet, like pigs do.

If we wonder why people are so apathetic and casual about every eminently avoidable horror in the world—famine, war, disease, the seas gradually turning piss-yellow and filling with ringpulls and shattered fax machines—it’s right there. Heaven. The biggest waste of our time we ever invented, outside of jigsaws.

Only when the majority of the people on this planet believe—absolutely—that they are dying, minute by minute, will we actually start behaving like fully sentient, rational and compassionate beings. For whilst the appeal of ‘being good’ is strong, the terror of hurtling, unstoppably, into unending nullity is a lot more effective. I’m really holding out for us all to get The Fear. The Fear is my Second Coming. When everyone in the world admits they’re going to die, we’ll really start getting some stuff done.

(Caitlin Moran [source])

I love that Moran turns the standard premise on its head. She doesn’t admonish us to rage against the dying of the light, nor does she urge us to eat-drink-and-be-merry. She doesn’t accept the “…for tomorrow we may die” epilogue to such sentiments. Yet she doesn’t say, y’know, to embrace death, either. She encourages us to be grateful for the implicit incentives death offers us, unbidden — the incentives to live, fully, in the meantime. She says, in effect: Assume you’ll die tomorrow, or if you’re lucky maybe next week or in a year or two. The time grows ever shorter. So what matters to you? And what are you doing about it?

Let’s see what someone else has to say about it:

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

(Philip Larkin [source])

“This is what we fear—no sight, no sound,/No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,/Nothing to love or link with,/The anaesthetic from which none come round”: yes, just so. The point being that it’s coming, oh it’s coming all right — inexorably, undeniably — but for now: we have sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, a brain to think with, a hear and soul with which to love or link, a blessed every-waking-hour gift. Can we use it? If not for our own sake, for the sake of everyone else?

Living, Dying, Making Connections, and Living With It All

July 30, 2021 by John 1 Comment

[Image: “Danse Macabre,” by Rodolfo Pace. Found on Flickr; using it here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!)

From whiskey river:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?

(Richard Dawkins [source])

Although that passage (as whiskey river noted) was excerpted from Dawkins’ book, Unweaving the Rainbow, that wasn’t where the whiskey river blogger(s) encountered it. Instead, they apparently crossed paths with it at the estimable blog/newsletter called brain pickings.

Contemplating even a single brain pickings post at length can induce a sort of stupor — a mix of awe, secondhand exhaustion, mental overstimulation… It’s possible to subscribe to it, and certainly deserves any pennies you can spare, because it represents the work of a single person, Maria Popova — who also has a day job, and writes regularly for such “lightweight” media outlets as The New York Tmes, The Atlantic… I cannot imagine what her daily schedule must be. (On the other hand, she freely discusses her regimen when interviewed by those same publications. She makes it sound so inconsequentially casual and off-the-cuff that one must conclude: This young woman seriously needs to get her modesty engine in for an overhaul.)

At the core of her brain pickings work: a phrase which, she says, she picked up from elsewhere — combinatorial creativity. (Einstein used the phrase “combinatorial play” — an appealingly lightweight way of saying the same thing.) Her role, she says elsewhere, is that of an “interestingness curator… someone who digs out interesting cross-disciplinary content in a way that allows people to become interested in things they didn’t know they were interested in until they discovered them.”

Anyhow, an essential component of any brain pickings post is its, well, its assemblage — Popova concentrates on a single work by a single writer, painter, sculptor, but apparently she has not just a hard-working modesty machine but an automatic idea-magnetizer as well: she sticks works together from all over, all disciplines, multiple artists…

Consider: in the entry which cites the Dawkins passage, Popova also refers (at least glancingly) to a handful of earlier posts of hers, covering or mentioning in passing:

Jorge Luis Borges,
Milan Kundera,
“French novelist, poet, and philosophical pamphleteer Léon Bloy (July 11, 1846–November 3, 1917),”
the late Emily Levine (standup comic, public speaker, writer, actress, and a friend of Popova’s),
the poet Anna Belle Kaufman,
Marcus Aurelius,
Montaigne,
Charles Darwin,

…and so on and so forth — each a multi-branching rabbit hole of its own, generously illustrated with art and photography (much of it her own). Here’s one of those connected bits, from a post in September, 2012 — a bit crafted by a notoriously cranky sufferer of a cancer which would eventually kill him:

The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whereby one progresses from denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of “acceptance,” hasn’t so far had much application to my case. In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by the gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read — if not indeed to write — the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity.

(Christopher Hitchens [source])

Give the Kaleidoscope Its Due

May 5, 2017 by John 2 Comments

[Image: “Quiet Nature | Game of light,” by Vasile Hurghis. (Found on Flickr; used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) The scene is a Romanian landscape. I don’t know about you, but my own eyes resist seeing the tower on the right as what it is… especially when looking at anything else in the photo. I keep seeing it as a doorway to a world of colors which don’t exist in the foreground world. And honestly, I guess there’s no reason it can’t be that, is there — no reason it can’t be both that, and a simple rustic silo?]
From whiskey river (including the first paragraph, found elsewhere):

At 19, I read a sentence that re-terraformed my head: “The level of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang.”

In all the aeons we have lost nothing, we have gained nothing — not a speck, not a grain, not a breath. The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over.

Each baby, then, is a unique collision — a cocktail, a remix — of all that has come before: made from molecules of Napoleon and stardust and comets and whale tooth; colloidal mercury and Cleopatra’s breath: and with the same darkness that is between the stars between, and inside, our own atoms.

When you know this, you suddenly see the crowded top deck of the bus, in the rain, as a miracle: this collection of people is by way of a starburst constellation. Families are bright, irregular-shaped nebulae. Finding a person you love is like galaxies colliding. We are all peculiar, unrepeatable, perambulating micro-universes — we have never been before and we will never be again. Oh God, the sheer exuberant, unlikely face of our existences. The honour of being alive. They will never be able to make you again. Don’t you dare waste a second of it thinking something better will happen when it ends. Don’t you dare.

(Caitlin Moran [source: well, the quote is everywhere, dating back to at least 2014, but I don’t know the original])

…and:

A Child is Something Else Again

A child is something else again. Wakes up
in the afternoon and in an instant he’s full of words,
in an instant he’s humming, in an instant warm,
instant light, instant darkness.

A child is Job. They’ve already placed their bets on him
but he doesn’t know it. He scratches his body
for pleasure. Nothing hurts yet.
They’re training him to be a polite Job,
to say “Thank you” when the Lord has given,
to say “You’re welcome” when the Lord has taken away.

A child is vengeance.
A child is a missile into the coming generations.
I launched him: I’m still trembling.

A child is something else again: on a rainy spring day
glimpsing the Garden of Eden through the fence,
kissing him in his sleep,
hearing footsteps in the wet pine needles.
A child delivers you from death.
Child, Garden, Rain, Fate.

(Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch [source])

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Finding the Life You Want in the Life You’ve Got

October 23, 2009 by John 6 Comments

[“Crossroads,” by Hungarian artist István Orosz. For more about this image, see the Note at the bottom of this post.]

From whiskey river:

A Note

Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;

to be a dog
or stroke its warm fur;

to tell pain
from everything it’s not;

to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.

An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;

and if only once
to stumble upon a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour or another,

mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;

and to keep on not knowing
something important.

(Wislawa Szymborska [source])

…and:

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality, and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.

(Marilynne Robinson, Gilead [source])

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