by Andrew Stark
Yet the existentialist consolation can still work for those of us who operate as if we know when we’ll die, while never believing with absolute certainty that we actually will. With the incentive of an approximate death date in mind, almost all of us still get rolling and create a self. It’s just that we make decisions that assume a life span of a certain length. We marry at a certain time. We have children at a certain time. We retire at a certain time, nag our children to have their own children at a certain time, and seek pensions and insurance appropriate to that span of time—even as we suppress the knowledge that we could die either well before that life is done, or long after. That we could, as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says, depart either too early or too late.15
At its most universal, this existentialist idea—that it makes sense to talk about a self either predeceasing or postdeceasing its own life—assumes the image, the age-old image, of life as an arc: “the curve of our life,” as Sartre called it.16 The arc’s peak is the moment in a person’s life when he might say, “Lord, take me now.” For some of us, the peak might come very early, with the arc’s ascent fast and dizzying: you become an international rock star at the age of thirty. For others, the peak might come later, somewhere in midlife, with the arc’s descent slow and gentle: you retired at the height of your game at sixty-two as a globe-trotting consultant, and then gradually fell out of the loop, lost contact with colleagues, stopped traveling because there were fewer places you wanted to see, and started to spend hours sitting on the porch of your time-share staring out at the lake. Or then again, as with the actor Bruce Dern, you might enjoy “an unlikely career peak at the age of 77.”17
Ideally, the logic of the existentialist consolation suggests, your self should depart when your life is at its peak, however you define it. Too early, and you will be cheated by the fact that you won’t have finished the great authentic accomplishments or enjoyed the most intense experiences of your life. Too late, and you will be tormented by the reality that nothing you do anymore will be as significant; nothing you experience anymore will be as vibrant. Ideally, as Sartre said, you would die when your life has reached the final notes of a brilliant melody, after which the only appropriate thing would be silence.18 Or, as Nietzsche urged, you would die when your life has attained its maximal moment of ripeness, like a fruit just before it begins to rot.
The peak of your life’s arc determines when your self should end. Ideally, your self should terminate neither before nor after. In contrast, for the bucket listers, it is the self’s departure that determines when their life should end. Ideally, if they have chosen the right items for their list, their life will end neither before the self nor after.
But actually, as we shall now see, someone who views her life as an arc almost certainly will want to die either too early or too late.
Live Fast, Die Young
For rock superstars, the arc of life rises precipitously. It looks as if it will peak early, perhaps at thirty or forty. You might think that an existentialist psychology would counsel us, if we are a rock superstar, to hang on at least until that high-water mark. But not necessarily. In fact, the more precipitously the arc rises, the more the existentialist dynamic will pull us toward checking out before we have reached the peak.
Allow for the idea that the arc of life begins, say, when we’re twenty. That’s how old we are when our band busts out of our garage and catches the interest of the music mogul Clive Davis. In the first two-year interval under Davis’s management our arc rises dramatically. We go from zero to sell 500,000 records. In the next two-year interval, we rise even higher, but—given the way arcs are shaped—a little less dramatically: we go from 500,000 to 800,000 records sold. In the next two years, we rise even higher but by an even less dramatic amount: we go from 800,000 to 1,000,000 sales. That’s the thing about arcs, especially precipitously rising ones. Long before they have risen to the peak, their first derivative—the amount by which they rise in any given period—itself peaks. That’s essentially true too if, instead of an arc, we think of our rock career as a bell curve: yes, at the very early stages, our rate of increase might itself increase. But soon enough it begins to diminish as we head toward the peak.
And so, supposing it’s desirable to die when your arc is at its peak, as Nietzsche suggests, a question: Shouldn’t it be even more desirable to die still earlier, when your rate of increase—the slope of your ascent—is at its peak? Suppose it’s a letdown to have to soldier on long after your life has crested. Then why isn’t it also a letdown to have to do so long after the increments by which your life rises have crested? And then wouldn’t you want, after having lived fast, to die young? At about age twenty-seven?
Think of the so-called Forever 27 club. Its members include rock stars—principally, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse—who died at that age. Of Joplin, her friend Jerry Garcia judged that twenty-seven “was the best possible time for her death . . . [she was] going up . . . like a skyrocket.”19 A skyrocket—the kind that carries fireworks—initially launches at a precipitous angle. But almost immediately that angle of incline begins to diminish. Long before the rocket actually peaks and then starts to descend, its rate of ascent will have started to slow. So the best possible time for Joplin’s death, Garcia is saying, was well before the peak, when Joplin was at her highest rate of ascent. After all, as Joplin herself remarked, “If you think I’m good now, wait ten years, boy. I’ll blow your fuckin’ mind. Whoooo! . . . If I ain’t ten years better than this ten years from now, you know, I’m gonna start selling dope again.”20
Joplin’s goal wasn’t simply to be better in ten years. It was to be ten years better—to rise by the same amount in the next decade as she had in the previous one. The shape of the arc dictates that that isn’t going to happen.21 But Joplin rejected that reality: her life was never going to “level off . . . it’s going to go straight up and when I’m eighty, I’m going to die.”22 The only way that it could go straight up, unfortunately, was for her to die at twenty-seven.
In the autumn of 1970, the journalist John Tabler told Jim Morrison that Morrison’s band, the Doors, had produced an “epic” first album, and that subsequently the music had “certainly progress[ed].”23 It sounds like Tabler is describing someone on the upward ascent of an arc, but Morrison was not happy. He took the comment to mean that his rate of ascent was declining: he’d started off great, and then got even better—but the increment of “better” was not as big as the initial increment of “great.” Morrison himself acknowledged that “the music has gotten progressively better,” but that wasn’t enough: “I think that that great creative burst of energy that happened 3 or 4 years ago was hard to sustain.” He professed himself “dissatisfied.”24 And thus Morrison lived fast and died young.
“Die at the right time,” Nietzsche said. But many, adopting his logic, interpret the right time to be well before the peak.
I Never Can Say Goodbye
Now let’s move from precipitously rising to gently descending arcs. What made Nureyev “want to dance . . . for so long past his peak,” the journalist Christopher Bowen once wrote, “is a question many in the dance world—and beyond—have asked.”25 What happened to quitting while you’re on top, at the apex of the arc?
Late one October night in 2002, Dennis DeYoung of the rock group Styx could be found singing his 1979 hit “Babe” to a small audience in a Las Vegas casino. DeYoung wanted to make it “possible for a few hundred people to believe, with their eyes closed, that they [had] been transported back at least a couple of decades.” Nineteen-eighty was “probably the very peak for Styx,” DeYoung acknowledged, but his later shows had “told me that people didn’t forget the songs I wrote.”26 It’s not that DeYoung’s postpeak life was a sad decline from his peak performances so much as a reminder of them. In a way, his life did stop at the peak, precisely as Nietzsche recommended, and then it turned into a memorial—not an object in space like most memorials, but a serie
s of events in time. Had DeYoung stopped performing at the peak, his fans would have stopped thinking of that peak. His later concerts didn’t obscure but rather recalled it.
Attending a fall 2000 performance by the rock group Kiss (peak year, c. 1973), the journalist Frank R. Pieper encountered forty-something parents with their kids made up as Kiss members, listening to the band’s 1974 hit “Cold Gin.” It had become “embarrassingly obvious how mediocre the band’s musical talents really are after 27 years,” Pieper reflected; “their vocal harmonies were often out of tune, guitar riffs repetitive and uninspired, bass and drum rhythms sophomorically basic and ultimately monotonous.” So what was the point? It was probably revealed by guitarist Paul Stanley. As “Kiss took its final bows, Stanley almost begged his audience, ‘Don’t forget us.’”27
Well into his eighties, Ed Koch, whose career peak as mayor of New York had ended two decades earlier, could be found out on street corners stumping for Democratic candidates in local elections. “Do you remember me?” the former mayor would ask a voter. And then, getting a hesitant nod of affirmation, Koch would lean in, grasp hands, lock gazes, and put the real question: “Do you remember me . . . fondly?”28
The peak of the arc, then, seems to be surrounded by two slippery slopes. On the one hand, the same anxiety that shudders at the thought of a postpeak decline can cause a person to rebel—long before he has even reached the peak—at the mere thought of a declining rate of ascent. Hence the “forever twenty-seven” club. On the other hand, the same desire that keeps a person ascending right to the peak can cause him to linger on during a long descent, simply to remind others of the summit he once occupied.
Die right at the peak, Nietzsche recommends. But his own logic takes those who would otherwise depart at the peak of the arc and draws them magnetically toward either end.
Strange Fruit
Die at your life’s peak, Nietzsche counsels. Yes, certain logics might pull you away from the peak on either side. But still, the best kind of life ends at the moment the pinnacle has been reached. Or, to switch to another metaphor, one Nietzsche also deploys: the best life ends at its point of maximal ripeness, just before it begins to rot.
But let’s look at the fruit metaphor a little more closely. The idea is that a person’s life begins with the sour greenness of young fruit (“What was youth, at best?” Dorian Gray asks himself, “a green, an unripe time . . .”), ripens and sweetens into a choice apple or pear or plum—its best-by date—and then slowly rots and festers. Folk wisdom tells us that at the moment of its maximal ripeness and sweetness, a piece of fruit will fall from the tree and hence—cut off from its source of nutrients—can be said to have died.
Ideally, that’s how it should be for us as humans. At least that’s how it should be if we seek existential solace for death—the solace that comes from knowing that we are departing neither before nor after our point of maximal ripeness, but rather precisely at it: that death is good for us because it compelled us to live the most rich, authentic life we could, and now is taking us as soon as things would have started going south. “When the ripe fruit falls,” in the words of D. H. Lawrence, it’s the same as “when fulfilled people die”—implying that when people have long since gone beyond their point of peak fulfillment, it’s the same as if a fruit has begun to rot on the tree.29
But something about the fruit metaphor is not quite right. To signify a child who takes after its parents, we say that “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” This suggests that when the apple falls, it’s not dead but rather at the prime of its youth, with its life still ahead of it. We can push this backdating even further, equating the fruit’s fall from the tree not with death or even youth but with birth. A fruit, as Diane Ackerman notes, is actually an ovary or placenta.30 It’s a placenta for the seeds it carries, which themselves—and not the fruit—represent the life in question. Far from ending at maturity when the ripe fruit falls, the real life in question—the seed—is just being born, and the rotting of the fruit is nothing but the disintegration of its prenatal life support system. On this image, it is the seed which is life and the fruit the source of its nourishment, not the fruit which is life and the tree its conduit of its sustenance.
The moral of the story? Apples and pears and peaches go through a green-ripe-rot cycle, but not a birth-life-death cycle—not in the way human beings do. At any given moment, it’s impossible to say whether a piece of fruit is dying, living, or being born. And conversely, human beings go through a birth-life-death cycle but not a green-ripe-rot cycle—not in the way fruit does. At any given moment, it’s impossible to say whether a person is ripening, fully ripe, or rotting. Our life’s highest point does not come bearing a sign identifying itself as such. Many a life reaches a peak, appears to be declining, but then peaks again. Second acts, third acts, abound. Her friend Alice’s life wasn’t an arc, as Diane Athill writes in her late-life memoir Somewhere Towards the End; it “swung in arcs.” To die at the moment of “ripeness” may preclude rotting, but it may also preclude still further moments of ripeness.
But then, as Willy Loman said, “A man is not a piece of fruit.”
Seize the Day
If we weren’t going to die, we would never do anything at all. With all the time in the world, we would keep putting off till tomorrow what we might otherwise do today. We would face no tough trade-offs, the kind that give a life its distinctive contours and edges, since we could do anything and everything we wanted whenever we got around to it. And so in fact we would have no life—and no self. It’s not a constant awareness of death that would be paralyzing, says the existentialist consolation. No, it’s the absence of death that would be paralyzing. This assumption lies at the existentialist consolation’s very core.
Let’s put it to a test. Imagine that Barack Obama is immortal. Would he have said, in 2006, “No need for me to run for president in 2008. I’ve got all the time in the world. I’ll just wait till 2016. In fact, why not wait till 2116?” Unlikely. The event of running for president in 2008 was unique and unrepeatable. It carried its own characteristic risks and odds for success. For a whole host of reasons, it differed from the event of seeking, and holding, the presidency at any other time.
Even if we were immortal, there would always be tides in the affairs of men and women. If Obama had waited till 2016, some other Democrat might have come to prominence. Or possibly some other Democratic president, elected in 2008, would have brought in the health-care bill that Obama wanted for his own legacy. Events in time come with innumerable ligatures, filaments, and tendrils connecting them to other events in time. They cannot simply be moved from one point in time to another.31 To think that they can is to treat them as if they were as portable as objects in space. I can move a chair from the living room to my office and it remains the same chair. I cannot move a term as chair of my department from this year to five years from now—when the budgetary environment, the dean I report to, and the enrollment numbers could be profoundly different—and expect it to remain the same chairmanship. But I have to believe that I could, if I am to be consoled by the thought that, without awareness of my mortality, I would feel no heat to create a life. Otherwise, the ever-shifting character of events in time—when they’re not viewed as objects in space—is capable of providing all the heat I need. In important matters it’s always now or never, even without death.
Look up articles on ProQuest that contain phrases like “the opportunity won’t come again” or “the chance won’t come again.” I did, one November day in 2013. I found newspaper pieces discussing athletes training all-out for an event. Or politicians throwing their hat into the ring. Or businessmen pursuing a deal. Or actors vying for a choice part. Or humorist David Sedaris getting up the courage to make a pass at somebody he fancied. But none of them were doing these things because of their mortality. It wasn’t that they worried that the chance might not come again in their lifetime; it wasn’t because they worried they might die before the opport
unity returned once more. It was, in each case, because the chance would not come again, full stop. It was because of the uniqueness of the opportunity itself as they saw it. We, most of us, view our opportunities as momentary events that time offers and then tears away. We don’t look upon them as objects that persist over time such that, absent death, we would always be able to exploit them when we got around to it. All we need is the never-ending flux of time, not the finality of death, to get us moving.32
Knowing that events—opportunities and possibilities—are momentary, we feel a continual urgency to get out into the world, to act and to experience, even without thinking of death or our eventual finitude. Yes, absent death—if we lived forever—perhaps at one point we would become sated and bored, sapped of the will to do anything. But if that ever happened, then death—if it were reintroduced—wouldn’t compel us to get off the couch. Instead, we would welcome death as an escape from the interminable boredom of a world in which life, itself, no longer presented sufficient novelty to get us moving.
All of which brings us to the one philosopher who looms over the existentialist consolation almost as much as death, according to that consolation, looms over life.33
