the big sleep

Obiter Scripta, no. 79

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A frequent and attentive prospect of that moment, which must put a period to all our schemes, and deprive us of all our acquisitions, is indeed of the utmost efficacy to the just and rational regulation of our lives; nor would ever any thing wicked, or often any thing absurd, be undertaken or prosecuted by him who should begin every day with a serious reflection that he is born to die.

— Samuel Johnson

Just over ten years ago, I reported that I had indeed been waking up each morning with a strong awareness of my own mortality. Those kinds of reflections tend to appear at more random intervals these days, though still regularly. (Thoughts of his own death/Like the distant roll/Of thunder at a picnic — Auden.) But I’m afraid I must stand as the living (for now) disproof of Johnson’s conjecture, for while I may have avoided outright wickedness, I have undertaken and prosecuted much absurdity since then. Like rock smashing scissors, folly easily beats memento mori.

Roger Scruton

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Theodore Dalrymple:

In his last and moving article in The Spectator, indeed in the last paragraph he published in his lifetime, he stressed the importance of gratitude for what one has been fortunate enough to inherit. Take nothing for granted, preserve what is worth preserving, understand the fragility of things, remember debts to the past as well as to the future, take delight in the world. Such was the lasting message of this exceptionally gifted man.

When I heard yesterday of Roger Scruton’s death, I sat down with my copies of his books and leafed through them, looking for a representative paragraph or two capable of summing up what he has meant to me. Frankly, there are too many, and my thoughts about them aren’t very interesting for a tribute. Luckily, Dalrymple has done an admirable job here naming the main themes that I, too, will carry with me. Several years ago, I wrote to Scruton directly in an attempt to express my appreciation for his work. He didn’t respond (and of course I didn’t expect him to), but I do hope my letter made him smile.

Immortal Longings

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What is this joie de vivre that they talk about nowadays? Our hunger for God, our thirst of immortality, of survival, will always stifle in us this pitiful enjoyment of the life that passes and abides not. It is the frenzied love of life, the love that would have life to be unending, that most often urges us to long for death. “If it is true that I am to die utterly,” we say to ourselves, “then once I am annihilated the world has ended so far as I am concerned—it is finished. Why, then, should it not end forthwith, so that no new consciousnesses, doomed to suffer the tormenting illusion of a transient and apparential existence may come into being? If, the illusion of living being shattered, living for the mere sake of living or for the sake of others who are likewise doomed to die, does not satisfy the soul, what is the good of living? Our best remedy is death.” And thus it is that we chant the praises of the never-ending rest because of our dread of it and speak of liberating death.

…And they come seeking to deceive us with a deceit of deceits, telling us that nothing is lost, that everything is transformed, shifts and changes, that not the least particle of matter is annihilated, not the least impulse of energy is lost, and there are some who pretend to console us with this! Futile consolation! It is not my matter or my energy that is the cause of my disquiet, for they are not mine if I myself am not mine—that is, if I am not eternal. No, my longing is not to be submerged in the vast All, in an infinite and eternal Matter or Energy or in God; not to be possessed by God, but to possess Him, to become myself God, yet without ceasing to be I myself, I who am now speaking to you. Tricks of monism avail us nothing; we crave the substance and not the shadow of immortality.

— Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

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That man desires immortality is understandable, but were it not for the influence of the Christian religion, it should never have assumed such a disproportionately large share of our attention. Instead of being a fine reflection, a noble fancy, lying in the poetic realm between fiction and fact, it has become a deadly earnest matter, and in the case of monks, the thought of death, or life after it, has become the main occupation of this life.

…Many people have substituted for this personal immortality, immortality of other kinds, much more convincing—the immortality of the race, and the immortality of work and influence. It is sufficient that when we die, the work we leave behind us continues to influence others and play a part however small, in the life of the community in which we live. We can pluck the flower and throw its petals to the ground and yet its subtle fragrance remains in the air. It is a better, more reasonable, and more unselfish kind of immortality. In this very real sense, may say that Louis Pasteur, Luther Burbank and Thomas Edison are still living among us. What if their bodies are dead, since “body” is nothing but an abstract generalization for a constantly changing combination of chemical constituents! Man begins to see his own life as a drop in an ever flowing river and is glad to contribute his part to the great stream of life. If he were only a little less selfish, he should be quite contented with that.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

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However, in an entirely friendly spirit, I would like to take issue with Alan Harrington’s fascinating article “The Immortalist” (May 1969), on the desirability of abolishing death, and the possibility of doing so through medical techniques.

The immortalization of any biological individual runs into the same logistic problems as building indefinitely high skyscrapers: the lower floors are increasingly taken up with channels for elevators. It’s called “the law of diminishing returns.” A brain that continues intact for 100, 500, or 1,000 years is increasingly clogged with memories, and becomes like a sheet of paper so covered with writing that no space is left for any visible or intelligible form. Thus a human being 500 years old would be as inert as a turtle of the same age.

Consider the following points: (a) Death is not a sickness or disease; it is an event as natural and as healthy as childbirth or as the falling of leaves in the autumn. (b) As the “natural childbirth” obstetricians are training women to experience the pains of labor as erotic tensions, there is no reason why the “pangs of death” should not be reinterpreted as the ecstasies of liberation from anxiety and overloads of memory and responsibility. (c) Suppose that medical science achieves a method of getting rid of the overload of memories and anxieties: Isn’t this what death accomplishes already? (d) The funk about death is the illusion that you are going to experience everlasting darkness and nothingness as if being buried alive. (e) The “nothingness” after death is the same as the “nothingness” before you were born, and because anything that has happened once can happen again you will happen again as you did before, mercifully freed from the boredom of an overloaded memory.

Along with most of us, Alan Harrington doesn’t see that this “nothingness” before birth and after death is simply the temporal equivalent of, say, the space between stars. Where would stars be without spatial intervals between them? The problem is simply that civilized and brainwashed human beings lack the perception that we are all one Self, marvellously varied and indefinitely extended through time and space with restful intervals. As St. Thomas Aquinas said, “it is the silent pause which gives sweetness to the chant.”

— Alan Watts, The Collected Letters of Alan Watts

I Stumbled On and All the World Fell Down

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We signed up a new client today, an eighty-year-old man. That’s unusual enough, but further along in our email correspondence, he told us that his wife and business partner of over fifty years died last year. He knows he has to keep busy, he said, so he decided to try this new venture. He had polio as a baby and he’s “getting more decrepit by the year,” so he walks with a cane now, but he’s still fairly active, and still plans on packing and shipping merchandise to us himself. I don’t mind saying that I feel a bit awestruck.

As I said, in my circumstances, the worst thing I could imagine is having to outlive one’s spouse. I remember reading a poem a long time ago where the author reflected on various types of fame and glory and concluded by saying something to the effect of “I’ve lived long enough to only be impressed by those who simply do what they have to do.” Amen to that.

Constant Companions Although We Wander, We’ll Meet Again In the Milky Way

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Stephen Pentz informs me that the poet Sam Hamill died this past April. As I’ve mentioned several times here over the years, his translations, especially of Chinese and Japanese poetry, were truly life-changing for me. His book Endless River: Li Po and Tu Fu: A Friendship in Poetry was the first poetry book that inspired an almost-religious devotion from me. It’s also the only book I’ve read so many times that the binding has cracked and the pages are literally falling out.

I would usually Google him every year or so to see what he’d been up to. Obviously, I hadn’t done so since the spring, at least. It used to be that new articles were hard to come by, but there were several obituaries, including one in the New York Times. Most of them focused on his political stances, especially his “Poets Against the War” initiative from 2003, which I suppose might be the closest he ever got to the mainstream. One remembered him spending a lot of time on Facebook in recent years, issuing political updates concerning anti-racism, Donald Trump, Palestine, and “contempt for the ‘Repugnicons’.” I have to admit it’s a little disappointing to have my memories of his work now diluted with images of him ranting on social media like a million other tedious bloggers in a hyperpolitical age, but I still have a happy memory of reading a Buddhist magazine in a Barnes & Noble and seeing a letter to the editor from him, making fun of a recent article about Buddhists whose Gnostic-like contempt for earthly existence manifested itself in disdain for a meditation center located above a sex shop in NYC. From Hamill’s Zen perspective, life is the sex, blood, filth and suffering of everyday life, not an otherworldly realm of intellectual abstractions. His poetry was visceral like that too.

The Echo That Is Love

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It’s knowing that this can’t go on forever
Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone
Maybe we’ll get forty years together
But one day I’ll be gone
Or one day you’ll be gone
If we were vampires and death was a joke
We’d go out on the sidewalk and smoke
And laugh at all the lovers and their plans
I wouldn’t feel the need to hold your hand
Maybe time running out is a gift
I’ll work hard ’til the end of my shift
And give you every second I can find
And hope it isn’t me who’s left behind

— Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, “If We Were Vampires”

I heard this song a few months ago while out driving. The melody did nothing for me, but the lyrics struck me immediately, especially the poignancy in the realization that a “mere” forty years can seem paltry to a couple in love. There’s also the endearingly honest weakness in the line about hoping to not be the one left alive to mourn. The next time I stopped, I looked the lyrics up on my phone, then texted the Lady of the House about them, saying that they made me think of her.

In Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, he added a reincarnation romance to the familiar story, with Gary Oldman’s Vlad Dracula furiously renouncing God after the tragic death of his wife. After 400 years of undeath, he encounters his beloved again in Victorian England and sets out to reclaim her. Later, he refrains from allowing her to join him in his vampiric state, saying that he loves her too much to condemn her. As Isbell’s lyrics recognize, the price of invulnerability is too high; it kills the very sentiment it’s meant to prolong. Cut loose from the tether of mortality, we float off into meaninglessness rather than freedom. Fantasies of afterlives or reincarnations, however understandable, are just another means of avoiding that painful reckoning.

My greatest fear, without question, is the possibility of having to survive her. Statistically, at least, that’s unlikely. But the threat of accidents and disease weighs more heavily on the mind than actuarial tables, and whatever selfish comfort I could take from the reassurances of probability is offset by the feeling that I love her too much to condemn her to years of aching grief. Would I stoically endure for her sake if I had to? I can only hope to have that much courage. I can only hope to never be called upon to demonstrate it.

I Think That I Shall Never See a Tomb as Lovely as a Tree

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And incidentally, no real sacrifices need to be made to make this happen, as the community of Hümmel has demonstrated for years. They have put entire old beech forests under protection and found innovative ways to market them. Part of the forest is used as an arboreal mortuary, where the trees are leased out as living gravestones for urns buried under them.

— Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate

Well, I’m convinced. Sign me up for a burial plot among the roots. I still prefer the DIY ethic — no need to involve money-grasping middlemen in such a private affair — but I suppose a little commerce is necessary to facilitate progress on a wider scale.

Luck’s Last Match Struck In the Pouring Down Wind

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Despite ample evidence to the contrary, I still find it difficult to accept that a life spent creating music and becoming rich from it could ever feel pointless. Oh, believe me, I’m well aware that many celebrities are utterly miserable and self-destructive, despite seeming to have it all. It’s just that music is still as thrilling and meaningful to me as it was when I was an adolescent, both as a listener and as a creator. How could anyone talented enough to create beauty out of nothing but imagination fail to be rejuvenated by the healing waters of musical creativity? Perhaps asking that question indicates that I’ve only ever been splashing around in the shallow end, safe from the dangerous undercurrents out where the truly gifted swim. Or perhaps, to borrow religious terminology, salvation is purely a matter of grace, not works. Maybe talent and undying passion are just more false idols. Maybe I’ve just been lucky, and he became unlucky, and there’s no more reason to it than that.

Doubtless, subsequent reports and eventual biographies will fill in further details, and they will likely offer seemingly clear reasons for why a man with a happy marriage, three kids, and a successful musical career would kill himself. Goodness knows, even a brief reading of his lyrics over the years can plausibly seem, in hindsight, to suggest inevitability rather than impulsivity. Was it depression? A relapse into substance abuse? Some other kind of personal trauma that became overwhelming? Any name will do; any rhetorical candle to provide a comforting, explanatory glow against the inexplicable darkness.

It’s not quite survivor’s guilt, but the shock of something like this almost makes me suspicious, wanting to look closely behind and under all the things that provide so much meaning in life for any telltale hints of gathering shadows. What if love, music, books and writing all desert me one day? Asking that question reminds me how quickly powerless we can all become, even as we build our lives around the illusion of control. And so we tremble and comfort ourselves with ritual words and behaviors while waiting and praying for the periodic darkness to pass without something in it lingering and turning its gaze in our direction.

Dreaming of a Skeleton Key

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Douglas Dalrymple:

If man is born in freedom, with infinite possible futures open to him, the fact of living at all will require that he is locked out, finally, from nearly all of them. Sometimes further accommodation is simply not possible. We age and grow and so lock ourselves out of the womb, out of childhood, out of our parents’ home, out of youth. We make friends and pursue lovers and so exclude ourselves from other friends and other lovers. We make any number of choices, but eventually there comes a final door for each of us. We will step through it and it will close and we will find that we have left the key inside. Eventually, then, we do step into a night (cold and black, or warm and bright with stars – who can say?) which locks us out of tomorrow morning. Dithering in the hall, however, you find that straining to hold open multiple doors at once will get you – precisely – nowhere. Like death, life only happens when you lock yourself out.

This is the third of three poetic, beautifully written paragraphs. Go read the other two.

A Brief Spark of Sweetness In an Aching World

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12/1999 — 7/24/14
There will be years and years, each small forgetting a betrayal, each small betrayal a comfort, each small comfort another death. There is no lesson here, no lesson. Narcissus sought himself reflected in the world and found only death. Plums will bloom until there are no more plums. I will join him diffused into the soil, our component atoms intermingled one day soon, a dog and a man who walked together for a time, a brief spark of sweetness in an aching world.

Tom Junod:

The number of rescue dogs rises almost as inexorably as the number of pit bulls, and for good reason: The rescue movement came to its current prominence addressing the impossible plight of pit bulls—a plight that lent moral prestige to the cause of unwanted golden retrievers and Labradors. This is not to minimize the challenges faced by unwanted dogs of any breed; there are, after all, nearly four million American dogs in American shelters. But an unwanted pit bull is different from an unwanted golden retriever in that a market exists for unwanted golden retrievers and golden-retriever mixes; they are literally shipped from animal shelters in the south to animal shelters in the north because there are not enough of them. There are plenty of unwanted pit bulls. An unwanted pit bull generally stays unwanted, and the moral reward for rescuing one—okay, the moral self-congratulation—is doubled by the knowledge that it beat overwhelming odds just to stay alive.

…Every year, American shelters have to kill about 1.2 million dogs. But both pro- and anti-pit-bull organizations estimate that of these, anywhere from 800,000 to nearly 1 million are pit bulls. We kill anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 pit bulls a day. They are rising simultaneously in popularity and disposability, becoming something truly American, a popular dog forever poised on the brink of extermination.

My heart is broken again for the sixth time in seven years. If there’s a perspective or a mental trick one can play on oneself to somehow make this more bearable, I haven’t found it yet. “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” Whether that came from Dr. Seuss or Gabriel García Márquez, I try my best to appreciate the wisdom of it. It happened, and it was good. It could so easily have been otherwise.

This one, like several of my others, came from a shelter too. A friend of ours ran the overflow for her county’s shelter. That is, she had dozens of kennels on her personal property where she would house dogs who had used up their time waiting to be adopted, but whom she felt deserved an extra chance. At that time, I was already beginning to feel the exhausting strain of being involved in pit bull rescue, but my ex convinced me to go out and see this ten month-old puppy her friend was raving about.

He was the absolute cutest, friendliest, most docile dog I’ve ever had. A true ambassador for the breed. It is utterly heartbreaking to think that a chance intervention saved him from being just one more puppy euthanized before he ever had a chance to discover how much he loved the taste of pizza, how good he was at singing along to the harmonica, how his terrier bloodline made him an expert mouse-catcher. It’s astonishing to think that such a perfect dog could sit in that shelter for two weeks without anyone wanting to take him home. The thought of thousands, or millions, more like him who weren’t and won’t be so lucky is unbearable. My mind just blanks out trying to contemplate it. Whenever I win the lottery that I don’t play, that’s what I’ll do with my money — give as many of them a chance to live out long, happy lives as possible. 

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