by Andrew Stark
Look at it this way: It’s true that as it is—mortals that we are—many of us reach a point where we wish to die due to the unhappy pain or debilities of advanced age. But we can still remain happy about the life we led because of the wonderful memories we have: because, as we recall it, it was a good life. Epicurus, for one, was in this circumstance. So why couldn’t option-immortals do the same? Why couldn’t they die remembering an extremely long happy life, which they then terminated as soon as it became painful or unpleasant?
The problem is that option-immortals, pondering whether to terminate their lives, would be in just the opposite situation. It wouldn’t be one with happy memories that, as soon as unhappiness in the form of pain and debility irrevocably descended, they’d end. Instead, the immortal life I have been imagining throughout is one that, given scientific advances, is free of pain and debility. Unhappiness descends, if and when it does, precisely because the immortal’s memories, happy though they once may have been, have begun to putrefy. Either the immortal’s memories of the good times have disappeared altogether (self-alienation), or they have become crushingly stale (boredom), or they have become the very things that have prevented the immortal from adapting to unending novelty (nostalgia). For the option-immortal to be willing to die, wouldn’t his entire previous life—as it exists in his memory—have to lose its value?
Or look at it this way: Option-immortals, presumably, wouldn’t terminate their life simply if things got a little worse. After all, the longer a life is or can be, the more serious and weighty a proposition it is to consider ending it. That’s why the centenarians in Shaw’s Back to Methuselah are so much more accident-averse than we decadarians are.2 Instead, things would have to get a whole lot worse. Option-immortals would bring themselves to terminate a life of vastly heightened longevity only when things got so much worse that, looking back, they would no longer, on balance, see the value of their life at all—only when, on balance, they would rather not have lived at all. Or at least I wonder if that’s not the risk. The best of both worlds, life and death, won’t necessarily be possible if immortality is an option. For option-immortals to be willing to choose death, they would have to have lost contact with their life in some profound way.
And so in examining consolations for mortality, I have taken mortality’s alternative to be not optional but irreversible immortality. I am skeptical of the idea of a comforting middle ground, namely longevity for as long as life is happy, and then, as soon as it becomes unhappy, painless suicide. Though logically possible, I’m not sure how psychologically realistic that trick would be. It would require us to feel enough unhappiness to want to die while still remaining happy about the life we led.
Many have criticized Epicurus for assuming that human beings could ever become sufficiently unattached to life that we would be indifferent to and accepting of death, yet still sufficiently attached to life that we wouldn’t actually kill ourselves. The same kind of fine, perhaps impossible, balance would be required for a long-lived human to—at one and the same time—continue to view the life he led as a happy one, while having become sufficiently unhappy that he would be willing to end it. If he views his life as happy, he will not want to end it. And if he wants to end it, because the depredations of immortality have sufficiently set in, will he any longer be able to view it as having been a happy one? I don’t know, of course, but there is reason to think not. Option-immortality, like an option in the stock market, is far from a sure bet.
PART 4
Life Intimates Death
thirteen
THE BIG SLEEP
Death has rarely appeared as beguiling as it does in Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, toward the book’s end. It is impossible to completely convey the allure of Lampedusa’s imagery because its full punch comes from a sly bit of foreshadowing. But, toward the end, death takes the form of a young woman, lovely, modest, desirous. Gently nudging the dying old prince’s gathered and sobbing relatives out of the way, she finally arrives at his bedside. Until that moment, the delirium in the prince’s mind had seemed to him like a thunderous ocean. And then, when the woman at last is beside him, the “crashing of the sea subside[s] altogether.”1
In the gallery of sensory images for death, silence has one great competitor: darkness. For Lampedusa, death might be the subsiding of the roaring of the sea. But for Harold Brodkey, it is “this wild darkness.” For Andrew Marvell, the grave is a “fine and quiet place.” For Dylan Thomas, death is famously a “dying of the light” to be raged against. None of this surprises, since silence and darkness constitute the conditions most conducive to sleep. And so when we imagine the “big sleep,” we imagine eternal silence, eternal darkness.
Death portends a horrific loss, the loss of consciousness itself. But we lose consciousness in life all the time. Does the silence and darkness of dreamless sleep intimate death? And if so, is that a consolatory thought?
Yet as they pile up, a difference between aural and visual images of death, between silence and darkness, slowly emerges. As silence, death can seem attractive—calm, tranquil, peaceful, restful. As darkness, it comes across as menacing—cold, desolate, bereft, bleak. Darkness itself is so unappealing that even when it’s accompanied by the opposite of silence—by sounds—the result can seem hellish: think of a pitch-dark ghoulishly acousticed horror ride in an amusement park. Silence, by contrast, can be so beckoning that as soon as it’s joined to the opposite of darkness—joined to light—the result can rise to the rapturous: think of the silence of a sunlit meadow.2
Why does darkness threaten more than silence? Perhaps an investigation of ordinary language can help here. The aural word “sound” has not one but two visual equivalents: “sight”—as in “sights and sounds”—and “light,” as in “sound and light show.” That’s because any given object of sight—a ball, a book—and the light source that allows us to see it—the sun, a lamp—are usually distinct entities. By contrast, the source of a sound and the object we hear as a result—think of a racing car or an overflying plane—are one and the same. All you have to do is shut off the light, and even with innumerable sight-making objects present you won’t see them. But to shut off sound, you must get rid of or tamper with each sound-making object.
In Heart of Darkness Conrad contrasts the darkness with the whiteness that Marlow encounters in Africa. Darkness is horror. Whiteness, especially the whiteness of the river fog, is confusion. In other words, what Conrad does not do is contrast Africa’s darkness with its more natural opposite—lightness—because that would imply that European civilization is somehow more enlightened. Nor does he contrast whiteness with its natural opposite, blackness, which would have given his work a far more racialist tone than it already has. Instead, it’s darkness versus whiteness. Conrad is able to do this because the visual world offered him two scales to play with, black/white for the objects of sight; darkness/light for the source of illumination that reveals them.
And therein lies the key to why darkness, absence of light, will always be more bereft and desolate than silence, absence of sound. In darkness, the source of light to all objects is cut off. Sight is impossible; it is hopeless. In silence, by contrast, all that we know is that no particular object surrounding us is at the moment a source of sound. But at any other moment it or others still could be—there is no blanket source that has been extinguished, and so silence comes with hope. If we say that it’s so quiet you could hear a pin drop, we hold out the possibility that you could still—despite the silence—hear a pin drop. But we could never say that it’s so dark you could see a pin drop. There’d be no hope of that.
We have reason, then, to feel peaceful and secure when we think of death in Hamlet’s terms—the deep rest that is silence—while when we think of it in William Styron’s phrase—lie down in darkness—we feel cold and afraid. True, both metaphors fall squarely into the class of magical thinking. When we are dead we will experience neither silence nor darkness. But silence and darkness are as clo
se as we can get, this side of death, to intimations of what lies on the other side. They are the metaphors of choice for great writers who find themselves consoled by silence and desolated by darkness. But in the final analysis the only reason why silence is less threatening is that it’s more fragile than darkness. Any sound can end it, and make the world alive again, while no sight alone can end darkness. It’s not that death seems more attractive when we think of it as silence. It’s actually that silence is more attractive because it is less like death.
So despite the great literature they have inspired, our different reactions to darkness and silence ultimately say nothing about death itself—only about us and the way we sense, and cling to, the living world. If true intimations of death in life are what we seek, we shall have to look elsewhere. And apart from the darkness and silence we associate with sleep, life offers us one other kind of intimation of the utter sensory void that comes after our death: it’s the inkling we have of the utter sensory void that came before our birth.3
The Rocking Cradle
“The cradle rocks above an abyss,” Nabokov says, “and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”
Perhaps that is common sense. But then Nabokov says something more controversial. He describes those two dark eternities as “identical twins.” And in so doing, he gestures toward a famous query Lucretius posed thousands of years before. We remain undisturbed by the eternity of darkness that elapsed prior to our birth. Why, then—since the two are carbon copies—be petrified about the eternity of darkness to follow our deaths?
Yes, in a sense the two are carbon copies. We don’t exist during either of them. But what’s of interest here is not Nabokov’s take on those two boundless spans of dark time. It’s the imagery he uses for the compressed mortal life that separates them. He calls it a tiny “crack” of light. That’s a spatial image. In the picture Nabokov paints, it’s not a brief temporal interlude but a minuscule crack of space that separates the two dark eternities in time.
But how can a span of space separate two periods in time? Space is static. It doesn’t flow in the way time does. As an image for our abbreviated interval of existence, a crack of space utterly fails to represent life’s remorseless temporal current: the current that sweeps every one of us, second by second, beginning with the instant of our birth and ending at the moment of our death, further and further away from the dark eternity lying behind and closer and closer to the dark eternity lying ahead.
Yes, those two dark eternities, the prenatal and the posthumous, might well be identical as far as we would be concerned during their endless eons. But it’s as if Nabokov knew that anything that’s consolatory about that observation would immediately fall away were we to consider the relentless one-directional flow of the brief time that separates them: the flow that makes the prenatal dark eternity seem anodyne and the posthumous one spell annihilation. Only when we obscure that temporal flow with static spatial imagery, and describe our life as (say) a tiny crack, will the two dark eternities on either side stand a chance of seeming “identical.” In space, unlike in time, nothing would necessarily be carrying us ceaselessly away from the one and toward the other. We could be neutral between them.
Perhaps Nabokov’s imagery is no coincidence. Two millennia earlier Lucretius, in advancing his famous consolation—we’re indifferent to the eternal darkness lying behind us, so why shouldn’t we be just as unperturbed by the one lying ahead?—did something similar.
In the verses commonly called Folly of the Fear of Death, Lucretius speaks of the periods before birth and after death as “times [of] slumber . . . sleep and rest.” And in between the two, where the “light of life shines,” we human beings get put, Lucretius says, in “place.” Interesting. In Lucretius’s rendering, it seems to be a place of light—as for Nabokov it’s a crack of light—that separates the dark times before and after.
Elsewhere Lucretius equates life to a room, or to a banquet hall. He also says that none of us own our lives outright. Instead we merely lease them, as if life were a tract of land instead of a river of time. Perhaps Lucretius knew that only by suggestively wrapping our temporally flowing life in inanimate spatial symbols—like place and land and room and hall—could he even come close to portraying the two slumber times on either side as equivalent.
What about we who inhabit the illuminated space that Lucretius equates with life? What are human selves like? Lucretius uses analogies—and curiously static ones at that—to describe us. Anguished and unrequited lovers, he says, mimic “Tityus prostrate”: prostrate while vultures munch on his liver. Those of us who fear the torments of Hell remind Lucretius of “Tantalus benumbed”: benumbed by the giant rock hanging over his head. And weary, defeated politicians channel Sisyphus, eternally pushing his rock up the mountain only to have it tumble down such that he must start over: Sisyphus, who, far from marching forward linearly, just keeps cycling in position.
But these mythical figures—never moving in space—scarcely represent us mortal creatures, ever moving in time, ferried unrelentingly further and further away from the eternal slumber in back and nearer and nearer to the one in front. Nabokov’s rocking cradle doesn’t move forward either, just back and forth like Sisyphus.4
A more apt image comes from Schopenhauer. “A man,” Schopenhauer says, “finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: he lives for a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more.” During that “little while” of life—and a “while,” of course, is a stretch of time, not a stretch of space—do we remain inert and inanimate? Not for Schopenhauer. No, we resemble “a man running downhill, who cannot keep on his legs unless he runs on, and will inevitably fall if he stops.”5 That’s more like it. Not statically suspended between two identical dark eternities, but running as fast as he can—because he is compelled to do so—away from the one shrinking harmlessly in view behind him, and toward the one growing ever more menacingly larger ahead.
That’s how we twenty-first century bundles of ego and anxiety see our selves too. And so the eternal darkness before we were born, as we think of it from within the confines of our abbreviated mortal life, can never intimate the one to come. By depicting life as a kind of stationary place, and our selves who inhabit it as immobile, Lucretius subtly drapes our mortal existence in a timeless spatial imagery that casts the two dark eternities on either side as interchangeable twins. But such a gambit simply gives away how psychologically unpersuasive his argument really is. He could never have made the same case while picturing our selves and our lives as they actually are: our selves moving ceaselessly forward in time, our lives relentlessly propelling us—second by second—away from the one dark eternity and toward the other. In the end, Lucretius’s consolation, on which eternal posthumous darkness should leave us as serene as eternal prenatal darkness, will gain purchase with hardly any of us.
fourteen
STARDUST AND MOONSHINE
When we die, Philip Roth proclaims, we “enter . . . into nowhere without even knowing it.”1 Or as that other Philip, Larkin, puts it—and it is his words that now claim a kind of patent on this bleak point—consolations for death amount to
specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.2
Specious stuff: it’s all very well to claim that death is benign. Or that if we reflect on it, we will see that anything we might seek from an immortal life we can actually attain within the confines of our mortal existence. Or that real immortality would actually be terrible. But none of this philosophizing addresses the raw loss that death imposes: the loss of that precious
flicker, the light of consciousness. Console me about that, Larkin challenges. His poetry lends poignant beauty to the primal bark of raw emotion. After all the reasoning and all the rationales, I’d still desperately prefer to be a conscious, healthy human being than a corpse. Who wouldn’t?
But suppose that’s not the choice we face.
Consider two contemporary opponents in the debate over whether mortality is a good thing, Leon Kass and Ray Kurzweil. Kass, a physician and philosopher, prefers death to immortality. But he goes one step further. He sees death as a grace-bestowed relief from life itself when that life, the life of the human organism, begins to degrade into indignity and debility. As the process of organic deterioration that commences well before we die—first sans teeth, then sans eyes, then sans taste—painfully progresses, the prospect of death becomes more and more welcome. And what is death but the continuation of that organismic breakdown—first sans flesh and then sans bones—as we crumble into dust “a-blowing down the night,” returning to the soil, the air, and the sea.
Kurzweil, the scientist and visionary, prefers immortality to death. But he too goes one step further. He favors immortality over human life itself, looking forward as he does to the day when the life of the human species becomes outmoded and we all merge into a collective, higher-order, eternal cosmic consciousness. We will be driven to do so by the so-called singularity—the inevitable moment when computers become more intelligent than humans, encouraging us for the sake of survival to “upload” our own individual minds into a mass silicon-based superintelligence. No longer chained to the dying animal that comprises our carbon-based bodies, we will share both omniscience and immortality.
I note that Kurzweil, along with Hans Moravec, Marvin Minsky, and other like-minded visionaries, finds it exceedingly difficult to describe exactly what this metamorphosis would be like. Moravec, for example, speaks of us humans embarking on a “subtle cyberspace conversion, the whole becoming finally a bubble of Mind expanding at near lightspeed.”3 As the author Vernor Vinge observes in Churchillian tones, “an opaque wall [has descended] across the future.”4 But despite the fog that lies ahead, all of them—Vinge and the others—seem certain that humanity is heading in that post-human direction.
