Julian Barnes has a phrase from a novel I never quite finished that described what I felt then: the "sudden sense of the lancing hopelessness of the human condition." Barnes' point in context was that one never forgets it, when it happens. I certainly did not, in my case.
The most recent occasion was some months ago—it was the one that came in the middle of the night. I had had a glass of scotch with a friend—plainly an unrepeatable mistake—and the depressive effects of the artificial soporific, as well as the shallow and unsatisfying sleep it had induced, had plainly put me in a state to be receptive to the abject terror of annihilation and non-being.
"Oh no," I thought. "One day, I will die. And then all of this will have been for nothing."
Of course, in the pleasant morning sun or broad light of day, that conclusion doesn't seem to follow at all. As I sit here writing this, I think, "how does that make sense? Why does something count for nothing just because it comes to an end? Do we mean to say that everything that has ever ended was meaningless? Does the mere fact that a phenomenon is not perpetual render it unreal?"
I am just as incapable of arguing myself to the conclusion of my scotch-addled brain right now as I was at the time of seeing a way around it. Plainly, therefore, when we confront our attitudes toward death, we are dealing more with a matter of moods than of logical arguments. Unless, of course, those two were never as distinct or as easy to separate as we commonly believe.
There is a reason why Philip Larkin sets his blood-freezing meditation on the terror of death, "Aubade," in bed at early morning. One has to be in a certain mental state—a condition of freedom from the ordinary promptings and naggings of the daily routine that pull you on from action to action—in order to contemplate the possibility that the eventual termination of one's being will render it all useless.
Within his poem, Larkin presents some of the usual arguments for consolation—the ways the rational mind can try to edge its way around the abyss, even when one is in the moment of greatest terror (pitched past pitch of grief, as Hopkins would say). He concludes, however, that all are sophistries that fail to remove the one fundamental fact: "Death is no different whined at than withstood."
More recently, grieving the loss of a relative, I turned to Tennyson's "In Memoriam A.H.H." Not because I thought I might find arguments there more potent than the ones Larkin has already dismissed, but because I knew it would be strong and maudlin stuff of the sort that was needed in this moment. There are times and states of mind when what one might elsewhere discard as sentimentality takes on a new candor.
It is impossible to be satisfied with the positive conclusions Tennyson reaches. When it comes time for him, in the course of the poem, to tell us how he finds solace when confronted with the fact of irrevocable loss, he simply denies that the loss is irrevocable. Because we are immortal. And how does he know this to be true? Because, he tells us, it would be too terrible if it were otherwise.
In the course of his poem, Tennyson presents us with many images drawn from the Victorian sciences of geology and life—all of which conspire to present a terrible and convincing image of vast planetary waste and wreckage; meaningless struggle of rejected lifeforms and the indifferent unvarying face of mute nature through endless eons.
And when he contemplates this prospect of an "an ever-breaking shore/ That tumbled in the Godless deep;" Tennyson tells us, he knows that it cannot contain the whole truth of life. Why? Because his heart declares "I have felt!" And thereby—allegedly—proves it otherwise.
"[L]ife shall live for evermore," he similarly declares, earlier on in the poem. How does he know this to be true? Again, because the alternative would be too dreadful. If this were not the case, says the poet, then "earth is darkness at the core,/And dust and ashes all that is[.]"
Surely there may be ways to console oneself, however, other than to believe in personal immortality. Swinburne for one claimed to find just as much solace in the thought that the "dead rise up never," than that they shall do so again. Likewise, there is the argument I offered above, and which I have developed on previous occasions: namely, that the mere fact of eventual non-existence does not diminish or negate the reality of present existence, nor its meaning nor value.
I quoted at the time the words of a Whit Stillman character, in arguing that just because the Brook Farm utopian socialist experiment ceased to exist, that doesn't render it a failure: "everyone ceases to exist," he says. "Doesn’t mean everyone’s a failure."
Tennyson, it seems, was acquainted with this species of argument in his own day (there is, after all, nothing new under the sun). He considers it briefly, before tossing it aside. "Might I not say[:]" he asks himself, "'Yet even here,/ But for one hour, O Love, I strive/ To keep so sweet a thing alive:'"
Again returns that haunting image of the endless churning shore of empty geological time:
And Love would answer with a sigh,
'The sound of that forgetful shore
Will change my sweetness more and more,
Half-dead to know that I shall die.'
O me, what profits it to put
An idle case? If Death were seen
At first as Death, Love had not been,
Or been in narrowest working shut[.]"
In other words, our ability to value the present even while it is the present would be hopelessly compromised, if we were to have certain knowledge that it would not last forever. Our attempted solution is no solution at all, therefore.
But this, then, is merely a prospect of despair. To say that we ought to believe in immortality because mortality is too frightening is not so much a solution to the problem, as a restatement of it. We cannot posit that which we seek to prove without committing an unpardonable petitio principii.
The fear of mortality we were willing to grant from the beginning, after all. That is why we turned to Tennyson in the first place. But to say that we must believe—because of this very fear—that life is eternal, is simply to pretend that there was never any problem to begin with. This logical loop must fail to satisfy mature minds.
And it is for this reason that the despair, rather than the "solution" that Tennyson presents, makes up the most moving portions of the poem. These have the greatest ring of truth. By the same token—for all their desperation—they are more genuinely consoling than Tennyson's proffered faith. They are what has made this poem figuratively immortal, even if I cannot join its author in believing that any of us is literally immortal ourselves.
There is another place in the poem, however, where Tennyson appears to let in the very argument he has just banished as insufficient. And it is fitting that he does so, because "In Memoriam A.H.H." is truly the work of a great poet, and it is the poet's role, as Whitman reminded us, to contradict himself; and it is the likewise the poet's role, as Blake reminded us, to take the devil's part and not know it.
For beneath the anguish of Tennyson's faith, there are the persistent flickerings of atheism. We see this not only in his dread of the images of the endless discarded lifeforms of the fossilized Cambrian explosion. We see it as well in his acknowledgement that Doubt often yields a truer faith than apparent certainty.
And we see it too in a passage in which he opens himself to the possibility that the present may exist and have value without needing eternity to justify it. In the course of the poem, he contemplates for several stanzas the thought that his work in writing the poem is futile. However much acclaim his words receive, they will eventually be forgotten and buried—like all of us and our works—in the sands of time.
To this, he responds for once without trying to deny the reality of the problem. He does not skirt the issue. Instead, he bites the bullet:
But what of that? My darken'd ways
Shall ring with music all the same;
To breathe my loss is more than fame,
To utter love more sweet than praise.
In other words, it is worth doing, in defiance of eternity and fate. It is worth writing in this very moment, this very hour, even if the words will eventually be erased by time. A profound truth. And yet, is this not very much the same argument as the one he has previously rejected—namely, the decision that: "even here,/ But for one hour, O Love, I strive/ To keep so sweet a thing alive[.]"
Of course it is. Because that is what makes Tennyson at true poet, and the poem a true poem. It dares to waffle and undermine and un-commit itself. Leave it for prose like this blog to pretend certainty in the face of ultimate things. For the poet must be more honest, and more human, and more unsure.
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