On two recent cross-country flights, I began and then finished Don DeLillo's justly famous 1985 classic, White Noise. Reading this darkly hilarious book on a plane ride was not only a source of great pleasure, it was also a test of sheer white-knuckled fortitude, for someone who once struggled mightily with a fear of flying. DeLillo's book is a meditation on the fear of death, after all, and one of his more vivid scenes to illustrate the concept involves sudden plunges on commercial airliners through tens of thousands of feet.
To plow with glee through several hundred pages of such reflections, while being jounced about in turbulent air at thirty thousand feet, is to marvel both at the extent to which one has managed to conquer one's own previous phobia, as well as at the delight of DeLillo's prose. Who else could make this forbidding topic so riotously funny?
DeLillo's book doesn't need to be summarized in full here. The important thing to note for our purposes is that the narrator -- a middle-aged liberal arts professor (surely not the first nor last time that has been the choice of profession for a character in a literary novel) -- is horribly afraid of the possibility of his own death.
He therefore rests his sense of normality and security on a (highly gendered, very 1980s) conception of his wife as the relatively "practical," good-humored one in the family -- someone who is incapable of being bogged down by such morbid obsessions. He and his wife periodically have loving arguments about which of the two would prefer to die before the other. They both claim that they wish to go first.
Our narrator/protagonist, Jack, knows that in his case, however, this is a lie. The fact is brought home to him by plot events that - without giving away any spoilers - end up saddling him with an ambiguous medical prognosis of eventual death by toxic exposure. As the plot unfolds still further, he soon has reason to doubt his wife really meant what they both said about wanting to die first either. Discovering that she suffers from the same preoccupations with mortality sends Jack on a destructive spiral.
Jack's increasingly desperate ploys to avert the possibility -- or subdue knowledge of the fact -- that he will one day die might be described as "irrational." One of the least harmful of these is an experimental course of psychotropic medication -- advertised in the back of a supermarket tabloid -- that is supposedly designed to treat the "fear of death."
Several of Jack's colleagues (who are not facing such an immediate deadline in their own cases) try to talk him out of this. In one such scene, Jack has climbed to an overlook with one of his colleagues, Winnie Richards, a biochemist. She tells him that death is necessary to life.
"I think it's a mistake to lose one's sense of death, even one's fear of death," she tells Jack. "Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit."
This is much the same argument that D.H. Lawrence offers in one of his poems -- from a treasured collection I once picked up at a free book give-away in a New England public library:
If there were not an utter and absolute dark
of silence and sheer oblivion [...]
how terrible the sun would be, [...]
And if there were not an absolute, utter forgetting
and a ceasing to know, a perfect ceasing to know [...]
how terrible life would be!
This is surely one of the more moving and persuasive of the various literary-philosophical tropes that are available when meditating on the fear of death. Death is essential to life. In the canon of consolation, this poem, and the idea is represents so well, has always stood out to me.
Like any such form of consolation, however, it is perhaps far easier to entertain when death is a distant and abstract prospect. Jack is consistently annoyed in the novel that his colleagues are willing to offer him so much "helpful" advice on this subject, when it is he -- not they -- who is facing the metaphorical fiscal cliff of his own life span.
In a later exchange on campus, another colleague -- the mordant pop culture studies professor Murray (who is engaged in teaching a course on car crashes at the time, in one of the wonderfully postmodern, Ballardian touches with which this novel abounds) -- tries out a whole series of chestnuts on Jack, who knocks them each down in turn.
"Do you believe the only people who fear death are those who are afraid of life?" Murray asks. "That's crazy. Completely stupid," is Jack's simple reply.
Murray even deploys a variant of the D.H. Lawrence argument, though his is less artfully phrased than the biochemist Winnie's version. "Do you believe that life without death is somehow incomplete?" he asks. "[...] Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?"
"How could [life] be incomplete?" Jack rejoins. "Death is what makes it incomplete."
Good point. It would indeed seem that life has all the arguments on its side, and death a paltry few. At the level of pure reason, life wins out every time. The reasons why so many of us want to live are not solely due to a pressing biological imperative -- though it is a real one -- they are also philosophically sound.
I am not persuaded by any of the usual objections to this. The idea that life is so full of suffering that it cannot be justified as a net good -- a notion that, I take it, has re-emerged, somewhat implausibly, in contemporary philosophical circles in the form of the doctrine of "antinatalism" -- seems to me pure sophistry. As a literary idea, it deserves the place it holds in the great poetry of melancholy, from Ecclesiastes to Heine. But as philosophy, it makes no real sense.
Both "suffering" and whatever we are implicitly contrasting it with -- pleasure, happiness, joy, love, or anything else that we might consider to be of greater value in life -- are only possible within conscious existence (i.e. life). The argument that suffering is bad (one of the premises of the "antinatalist" syllogism), cannot be based on a comparison with non-existence -- for that is a state of which we can have no knowledge one way or the other. It can only be based on an implicit idea of the "goods" that we find within life.
The whole argument between suffering and happiness, therefore, is a fight waged within the confines of existence. It certainly cannot be used as an argument in favor of non-existence. There is no argument for non-existence that we could possibly formulate in our minds. That is so, because we don't know what non-existence would be. In fact, it wouldn't "be." And "we" would be there. And there wouldn't be any "there."
If it is objected at this stage that I am once again over-relying on a transcendental mode of argument, I reply that I am doing so because it works.
It may also be objected that the argument against the possibility of opposing life is contradicted every day by the tragic fact that people commit suicide. We cannot say that all people actually want to live, when plainly some of us decide - in extremities of suffering and mental illness - that we do not.
This is a strong argument. I'm not sure of my response, as I cannot claim to know people's deepest motivations for this or any act. However, I would suggest that fear of death is one of the greatest engines of human melancholy and depression in general. It may well be the case, therefore -- however paradoxical -- that many people have committed suicide not due to hatred of life, but due to a fear of death.
DeLillo suggests as much in the dialogue between Murray and Jack. Murray asks his doomed colleague whether he would rather know the day and time of his demise, or have it come upon him suddenly, like a thief in the night. To which Jack replies that it is always worse to know, and that a world in which everyone was suddenly told in advance the date of their extinction would experience a rash of suicides -- "if only to beat the system."
Similarly, Ovid in his Metamorphoses offers in one scene a memorable description of a ghastly plague that led -- paradoxically again -- to a wave of suicidal behavior. Among the various responses it provokes among the desperate inhabitants of the city where it has been unleashed, Ovid tells us: "some hanged themselves, and fled/ By death the fear of death, and called their fate/ That came uncalled." (Melville trans.) Suicide can be as much an effort to cheat death, that is to say, as living.
If death has no points in its favor, however -- if it has no partisans among us and if, indeed, it is almost impossible by definition to desire it -- then is there any way we can ever escape our fear of death? If we cannot quite accept death, is there some way at least that we can justify its necessity, and thereby concede that it too merits a place in the order of things?
I know that I for one, after struggling mightily with anxiety about death through the first half of my twenties, eventually stopped worrying about it. At least on a daily basis. I couldn't tell you exactly how I overcame this fear. I couldn't point you to any profound philosophical jiu-jitsu throw I used in order to conquer it. The reasons why the fear of death departed were ultimately as mysterious as the reasons why it came, at some point in my early adulthood.
And it may well be the case, as mentioned earlier, that I am only able to escape the fear of death because, in my case, it is still a good long ways in the future (most likely). It is, again, telling, in DeLillo's novel, that Jack's healthy colleagues are the ones who are able to offer consoling insights about his eventual death, not the doomed man himself.
Along similar lines, Diana Athill writes in her beautiful and poignant memoir Instead of a Letter that, by the time of the book's composition, she had largely managed to "defeat[...] the passion for self-preservation which makes death seem an outrage[.]" But then, she immediately reflects in an aside: such a claim is "(easily said! Let the hum of an airplane's engine turn to a whine and my body stiffens, my stomach chills: 'Not yet!')."
I know how she feels. Airplanes again. I may not fear them as much as I used to. I may dislike traveling on them only as much as most people do, if not slightly less (since I do at least appreciate the reading time they offer). But as DeLillo and Athill both suggest, they are still the places in which the abyss intrudes most obviously into our otherwise death-free and solidly earth-bound middle class lives.
Perhaps, then, there is no way fully to banish the fear of death. Perhaps it is just there, fading in at out throughout the course of our lives. The psychological facts would seem to indicate, however, that we are able to reach greater and lesser degrees of peace with it over time. I know that in my case -- as in Athill's -- I have experienced major changes in the extent to which I suffer from it. And perhaps there is something that can be done, at the philosophical level, to make death seem less objectionable -- if never a "good" thing.
I tend to think -- in seeking a justification for the eventual necessity of death -- that D.H. Lawrence argument above deserves another look. While Murray reduces the argument to its more saccharine form -- in which manifestation it is easily shredded by Jack -- it also contains a profound philosophical and logical insight.
It may not be the case that life is more "precious" because it is "fleeting," but that is not all Lawrence -- nor the fictional Winnie Richards, for that matter -- is saying. They are also saying that the idea of death is philosophically necessary to the idea of life.
We cannot, of course -- as mentioned above -- know what death is, or what non-existence is. By definition. At the same time, we cannot really have a usable idea of life, unless we also know that life has an end point. (The fact that these two statements are irreconcilable, yet both seem to be inarguably true, is a philosophical conundrum I have never been able to answer -- a paradox that seems written into the very nature of things).
Life must have an end point, by definition, because life -- or conscious existence or whatever you want to call it -- occurs within time. And for something to occur within time, as Einstein has taught us, it must involve motion -- it must involve change.
This is what it means when we say that time and space are one entity -- space-time. In a world without motion, time itself would cease. Or, as the mad scientist De Selby explains in Flann O'Brien's The Dalkey Archive: Einstein "tried to say that time and space had no real existence separately but were to be apprehended only in unison." And while De Selby might beg to differ, I believe Einstein succeeded in conveying this message.
The idea of mutability is therefore encoded within the idea of existence across time. We must be mutable, if we are to continue as consciously existing beings.
What, then, are we to make of the doctrine of personal immortality? I think it doesn't work, and the world's folklore and mythology, in all of their wisdom, have long warned us against it.
If mutability is essential to the notion of existence, after all, then immortality would have to imply a state of ceaseless change -- for all time. We would have to become perpetual mutability machines. What this would mean is anyone's guess, but it doesn't sound good.
In one of Ovid's stories, to return to him, he tells us a classic myth about a couple who request immortality from the gods, but who forget to ask for eternal youth. As a result, they continue on for centuries past their original fated end, but always becoming still more aged and decrepit, still less able to enjoy the fullness of life. Here perhaps we can perceive a folkloristic gesture toward the philosophical problems with perpetual mutability.
Most versions of the doctrine of personal immortality do not accept this as a consequence, however. They suggest that, once we are in our immortal state, our mutability will cease. We will no longer exist within time or space, but rather will enter "eternity," where all change and motion and struggling have come to an end.
Which is all well and good, but it is -- upon closer examination -- simply another version of non-existence. The difference between perpetual "life" -- without motion, time, space, or change -- and "death" -- in the sense of non-being -- is impossible to perceive. Perpetual life on such terms is no escape from death; it is simply another word for death.
The world's folklore again perceived these truths long before many the world's official religions. In one of his essays, eminent folklorist Stith Thompson recounts a Native American legend, in which men are offered their pick of gifts from the gods. One man asks for eternal life, and gets it. As Thompson puts it, "he is rewarded by being turned into a stone."
So too, in Mircea Eliade's History of Religious Ideas, he offers a remarkably similar folktale from Indonesia. There, the gods offer men a choice between living life as a banana or as a stone. Men choose the banana, and therefore they -- like the banana -- become subject to decay over time. If they had chosen the stone, they could have lived forever. But they would have been unchanging.
To "live" as a stone, such tales seem to suggest, would not really be living at all. It would be to "exist" at the price of total inaction. Such an eternity would be indistinguishable from non-being. The idea that our individual personalities and consciousness could continue in such a state is meaningless. The reality of such an "eternal life" may be inarguable -- if this is what we mean by it -- but it has become a philosophical nullity.
The idea that life must end, therefore -- and here is the folktales' true lesson -- is essential to the idea of living at all. We are able to see, then, that death is not the enemy of life. It is part of the logical structure that sustains it. Of all the chestnuts of consolation, the claim that "death is a part of life" may be among the oldest, but it is also one of the truest. If there were not death, there could be no life. Or, to return to Lawrence's words:
And if there were not an absolute, utter forgetting [...]
how terrible life would be!
No comments:
Post a Comment