by Andrew Stark
A Dead Life
Certainly, not all of us might be able to dismiss our regrets in the way that the Harvard men do. If there’s a problem with their regret-palliation techniques, though, it’s not that they are looking at their lives through rose-colored glasses. It’s that any twilight tale they tell themselves about the lives they have led—accurate or not, happy and regret-free or not—can’t substitute for the techniques that immortality would afford them to place the definitive stamp on their own narratives.
“A dead life,” says Sartre, “is a life of which the Other makes himself the guardian.”16 Whatever interpretations the Harvard men try to imprint on their own lives before they die, others who live beyond them will always have the last word.
Sartre’s term “a dead life” is an interesting one. We normally think of persons—selves—as dead, not lives. But in a way, the Harvard men do try to have their lives die before they themselves do. Each lends his life an interpretation that wraps it up before he goes, just as any good Holderlin strategist would. And if a person’s own subjective view of his life is all that matters in tying it up, then, yes, they do tie theirs up.
Or, to use the common phrase, the Harvard men attain closure. Each treats his own life as a room on which he is the one, as the actress Valerie Harper hopes will be the case for her, to “close the door.”17 It’s as if a person’s life events were furniture occupying some kind of space, an enclosure of some sort, from which he can lock out all others, barring them from rearranging his carefully set venue. This is a prevalent metaphor. Joseph Brodsky thought that T. S. Eliot had done this. Eliot’s life, Brodsky observed, had become the occupant of a “vast and hidden room.” And Eliot himself had “latched his door.”18
And yet as death approaches, Harold Brodkey writes, not only are you “no longer the hero of your own story,” you are in fact “no longer even the narrator.”19 Ivan Ilych, who fails to wrap his life up before he dies, ceases to be the hero of his own story, as he watches others take over everything from his ongoing work projects to his seat at the opera. But if you do try to wrap things up and reach closure, as the Harvard men do, then you face a different difficulty. You must then join others as but one of your story’s many narrators, giving it your own spin. And those others—and in the case of the Harvard men, especially their wives—will outlast you, their spins differing markedly from your own. Unless of course you are Henry Kissinger. Burnishing the legacy of his long-since-wrapped-up-career, Kissinger in late life was “asked what, if any, were the advantages of his advanced years.” Kissinger’s response: “I seem to have outlived anyone who ever attacked me.”20
A “dead life [continues] to change,” Sartre says, even though “it is all done.” It may be “over,” in that “nothing more can happen to it inwardly . . . but its meaning does not cease to be modified from the outside”: by others who live on beyond us.21 Imagine yourself eavesdropping on those modifications. You’d be none too happy. A “person . . . finds it distasteful to hear his life recounted with a different interpretation from his own,” Milan Kundera observes in his novel Immortality, and he uses an imagined reminiscence by Ernest Hemingway to illustrate:22 “I was lying dead on the deck,” Kundera’s Hemingway reflects,
and I saw my four wives squatting around me, writing down everything they knew, and standing behind them was my son and he was scribbling too, and that old dame Gertrude Stein was there writing away and all my friends were there blabbing out all the indiscretions and slanders they had ever heard about me . . .23
Not all of us, by any stretch, care about the ways in which others might interpret our completed lives. But many of us—and Sartre thought that in fact all of us—do care. And the question is whether a mortal life enables us to do everything that an immortal life could in the way of stamping our own imprint on our personal past.
If you believe that you can “close” the door to your mortal life as if it were a room, or turn the latch as if it were an enclosure of some sort, then you will say yes. But for most of us, our lives’ events will not persist pristine in time the way objects do in sealed spaces. Instead, our lives’ moments will slip continuously back in time, giving way to succeeding events. And any one of them could reopen the question of the value and meaning of our lives’ work.
As a Harvard man lies dying, he might tell himself that the real, physical world in which he didn’t write the great American novel was the only one that was ever possible. But perhaps his wife, believing that the metaphysically closest world in which he stopped drinking was one in which he would have composed a masterpiece, will dismiss his narrative, after he’s gone, as a pitiful rationalization. A Harvard man might claim that he psychologically realized the possibility of a late life romance through his vineyard, with its sensual and emotional splendors. His friends, though, looking at possibility in more strictly logical terms, will shake their heads sadly at his pathetic delusion.
A life does not lend itself to being locked within the four walls of an area in space, there to persist unaltered. No, it assumes the form of a series of moments in time, ceaselessly moving back to make way for new moments, and those new ones may well involve other people or incidents, casting it in new lights. What will they say about you after your life has begun slipping back into the past? How will ensuing events—the collapse of your business empire, a lukewarm retrospective article on your literary work—reflect on it? If you are mortal—whether your life lasts fifty or five thousand or five hundred thousand years—then you won’t be at the table when those subsequent moments happen. You won’t be there to plead your case or amend the record. Only immortality can give you that. The “past derives its meaning from the [future],” Sartre says; and so “even admitting that I am free to [live] my life, the meaning of my life”—as long as I am mortal—“escapes me.”24
The closure metaphor—the metaphor of a person’s life as a room to which he himself can bar the door—is an illusion. Any consolation for mortality based on it is flawed.
seven
YOU NEVER KNOW
One day many years ago P, a relative of mine and a wealthy businessman, invited me out for dinner. I suggested that maybe we should ask another relative, L, to join us. P waved me off. With L present, P said, conversation would be dull. The problem was that L “isn’t an intellectual.” But “I,” P declared, “could have the worst stomach cramps in the world and I’d still grab a magazine before running to the bathroom.”
For me, P’s remark has come to symbolize a widespread syndrome. It’s the vague, gnawing, anxious sense that there is much about the world—everything, in fact, that lies outside our own domain of specialization—that we don’t know and will never have the time to know, thanks to the shortness of our presence on the planet. Think of the beauty of fractals that only skilled mathematicians truly understand. Or the theory of relativity which (it is said) only a handful of people comprehend in its full profundity. Or the exquisite psychologies laid bare in Henry James, whose complete works I will never have the time to read or (if I could find the time) entirely grasp. Or all those marvelous Sanskrit myths with their cosmic harmonies and comic disharmonies. The thought that we will pass through this world without knowing these things can be so burdensome, so tormenting, that we can be driven to repress it with the consoling thought that really, whatever it is that we don’t know about, or have not fully mastered, could not be all that complicated or daunting or interesting. We’re not missing that much. You’re a businessman and want to know what “intellectuals” know? Grab a magazine before running to the bathroom.
In Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities, the military leader General Stumm takes it upon himself to come up with a “redemptive idea,” a new governing doctrine to pep up his beloved but lethargic homeland of Kakania. Entering the Imperial Library to do a little research, Stumm figures that if “I read a book a day . . . I would be bound to get to the end sometime and then, even if I had to skip a few, I could claim a certain position in the wor
ld of intellect.”1 What the general is clinging to is what Proust described as a kind of self-soothing regimen for “mental hygiene”—one that “enables us to regret nothing, by assuring [ourselves] that we have attained to the best, and that the best was nothing out of the ordinary.” And so we can “resign ourselves to death.”2
Academics like me nurture the same kinds of feelings. I once got a bit of a lift when my undergraduate economics professor mentioned Joan Robinson’s critique of John Maynard Keynes’s macroeconomic theory. The problem, Robinson wrote, is that “Maynard didn’t take the ten minutes necessary to learn microeconomics.” Microeconomics—nice to think that I could master it over coffee one morning, if I cared to. Or consider the widespread phenomenon of what might be called the “lateral transfer.” Having been successful in one field of endeavor, many of us bet that it couldn’t be that hard to directly transfer over to the same level in another. Think of a billionaire who, having become an entertainment-industry mogul, might feel that he has the chops to become a similarly successful songwriter. Think of Edgar Bronfman, Jr. (sample lyrics: “Intimacy, I bless you/I worship at your feet/You’re the gentle breath on an open sore”).3
Given that we die, we have a tendency to tell ourselves that what we don’t know couldn’t be all that momentous or difficult to master—when really there is incalculably more to know and ideally we wouldn’t die. And of course, mortality not only prohibits us from knowing what there is to know now. That’s a drop in the bucket. It prevents us from knowing everything that humankind will ever discover, and everything that will ever happen to us as a species, on into the unending future. In the words of one contemporary “singulatarian”—someone who hopes that he can gain immortality by uploading his mind into a computer—“the only way I’m going to understand the universe is if I live long enough.”4
I think about this motivation for immortality—the craving to know the future, and especially whatever mankind might discover eons hence about the deepest secrets of God and consciousness and the universe—in weighing yet another claim that mortality can give us whatever immortality could. It reaches its most searching contemporary form in a 2010 book, Surviving Death, by the Princeton philosopher Mark Johnston. What Johnston does is to take the “Buddhist” consolation for mortality one step further.5 Death is benign, but not simply because the self doesn’t exist to begin with and so there is nothing that death in fact ends. Death actually needn’t even stand in the way of our attaining earthly immortality. And with it, attaining as well all the knowledge that humankind might amass on into the future. We “can,” Johnston says, “be conscious”—and thus conscious of whatever people may learn over the ages to come—even if we have “died.”6 “Literally,” Johnston assures us. But how, without any recourse to an afterlife, could this possibly work?
Moment by moment, Johnston says, the perceptions, thoughts, feelings, experiences, sensations, plans, and so forth that make up the flow of a person’s life seem to present themselves to her within a kind of perimeter. Think, by way of analogy, of the perimeter surrounding what we see at any given moment in time: the perimeter around our field of vision. The perimeter Johnston is talking about is like that, except that it surrounds not just what we see, but everything we are feeling, thinking, sensing, remembering, perceiving, and otherwise conscious of at any given moment: our entire field not just of vision but of consciousness. Johnston calls this perimeter the “arena of presence.” It is the “quasi-space,” as he says, in which our lives present themselves to us second by second.7
Ever since I can remember, the person at the center of my particular arena of presence has been Andrew Stark. And so the life—the series of thoughts, plans, memories, perceptions, and feelings—flowing through my arena is naturally focused on Andrew Stark and those closest to him. But, Johnston observes, I could easily imagine someone else at the center of my arena of presence—say Napoleon—and I would still think of it as my arena, not Napoleon’s. I can easily imagine that Napoleon’s thoughts, experiences, sensations—all the aspects of his life—are flowing through my arena, and that Andrew Stark, for the moment at least, has disappeared. We fantasize like this all the time. But what this means, Johnston says, is that there is in fact no necessary connection between any given “arena” on the one hand, and any given person on the other. Whichever person is at the center of your arena—or mine—is completely a matter of choice. Most of us, more or less by default, focus our arenas on the person we take ourselves to be. Mine focuses on Andrew Stark; Johnston’s on Mark Johnston. But again, that’s a matter of choice, not necessity.
So suppose that I choose to focus my arena not on me and my family but on all individuals on into the unending future. For me to do that seriously and continuously, not just as a momentary fantasy à la Napoleon, a new kind of life—a new flow of feelings, thoughts, hopes, and dreams—would have to begin presenting itself in my arena. My most tender feelings would no longer flow so much to my wife as to future generations and their need to live free from any debt imposed by my own. My thoughts would habitually wander not to whether my daughters will flourish, but to whether all future humans will have the resources they need to thrive. My plans would zero in not on the book I am writing but on how to eliminate global warming and save humankind from environmental disaster. I would become an altruistic person.
No longer, then, would my arena present a life centered on me. Instead, it would present a life centered on all human beings on into the future. It’s not, of course, that the actual lives of all others on into the future, with all their particular thoughts, feelings, and sensations—as well as whatever they come to learn about the true nature of God or the real purpose of the universe—would suddenly crowd into and become the focus of my arena of presence. But nor at the moment is the life of Andrew Stark on into the future, with all its particular thoughts, feelings, and sensations—as well as whatever he might come to learn about the victor in the 2020 presidential election or the price of oil in 2025—crowding into my arena of presence as it is.
Instead, it’s simply that if I have chosen (as I guess I have) to place Andrew Stark at the center of my arena, then I will come to know whatever he does whenever he does. And so if instead I choose to place all future human beings at the center of my arena, then I will come to know whatever they know—including the deepest secrets of mind and cosmos—whenever they do. The difference of course is that Andrew Stark will die within the next few decades, so he will not come to know very much. But humanity as a whole won’t die anytime soon and others on into the future will come to know a great many things. And I can make their lives mine every bit as much as I am currently making Andrew Stark’s. After all, there’s nothing more to being any particular person than choosing to place him or her—or them—at the center of one’s arena and living accordingly.
Suppose, then, that I do choose to make all others on into the future the focus of my arena. Then “after [my] death” I will, Johnston says, still remain “conscious . . . in and through the multitude [of others] that come after.”8 Literally, Johnston says: in exactly the same way that those others will be conscious. For all there is to being any particular person is making the choice to place him, or her, or them, at the center of your arena.
Johnston’s philosophy is scintillating and thought-provoking—and also a good deal more complex than I have presented it here. He offers one of the most sophisticated contemporary variants of a widely held and quite beautiful view. It’s something that occurs to many of us at one time or another. If we are sufficiently loving and altruistic, sufficiently integrated into the lives of others, then nothing of us ever needs to die. Our life will simply flow on into theirs and we can continue to live endlessly through them.
And yet: Johnston’s particular understanding of how we can accomplish this feat ultimately founders on a contradiction. And a revealing one at that.
The problem is his “quasi-spatial” image of the “arena of presence.” On the one hand, whate
ver my arena is, it can’t be anything like a self. After all, my arena will come to an end when I die. And so if my arena were indeed something self-like, then I couldn’t survive my death, as Johnston says I can. Something approximating my self would have truly been lost. My arena, then, cannot be equated with my self in any way; indeed, on Johnston’s Buddhist understanding, I don’t have a self to begin with.
But on the other hand, it would seem as if—for Johnston’s consolation to work—my arena does have to be at least somewhat self-like. For suppose that there were indeed nothing self-like about my arena. Then by focusing that arena on all other people on into the unending future and living accordingly, I would be doing nothing that in any way identified me with their lives. I would be doing nothing that would help make me live forever—make me survive my death—because my arena would have nothing about it that qualified as “me.” Only if my arena, in some way, figures as my self—as me in particular—will its focusing on the lives of all others on into the future give me an intimation of immortality.
So assume that the arena is indeed something self-like. Then yes, I could conceivably live on in others by making them its focus and living accordingly. But that would also mean that when my arena disappears with my death, something self-like would come to an end. And this would seem, in its own way, to undercut any idea that I could ever “survive death.” Since I will have had my own particular self-like arena, and all future others will each have their own particular self-like arenas, how could I ever claim to live on in them? We’d be different selves. Since their self-like arenas would be alive when the universe reveals its secrets—and my self-like arena wouldn’t—how could I ever come to glean knowledge of those secrets in the same way that they will? And then how could I ever, as a mortal, gain knowledge of the future in a way that intimates what immortality could provide?
