The Consolations of Mortality

by Andrew Stark

  Joan Didion gives us a sense of what it would be like to treat a precious event as if it were a precious object. She imagines—a bit of magical thinking—that instead of vanishing, like all events do into the past, her own twenty-ninth year actually lived on for decades as a cherished object in her husband’s eyes. That was lovely. Until, four decades later, it suddenly died with him. And so, instead of wistfulness over a youthful time long gone in the past, Didion finds herself, as she says, “grieving” and “mourn[ing]” what seems to her to be the death of her forty-year-old twenty-ninth year. After all, it had become a companion in her life—a companion every bit as long-lasting as her husband.15

  Leon Kass, a humane contemporary writer on questions of mortality, makes a virtue of the idea of transience. Perhaps, Kass says, “the beauty of flowers depend[s] on the fact that they will soon wither [like] the fading, late afternoon winter light or the spreading sunset. . . . Does not love swell before the beautiful precisely on recognizing that it (and we) will not always be?”16

  Kass’s poignant observation makes sense when we are talking about events, moments in time. The rose’s eclipsed hour of blossoming, the abbreviated instant of the sunset: their briefness before vanishing into the past adds luster to those moments. Such events (if I can be far less poetic than Kass) resemble certain consumer purchases, purchases of experiences, that are more valuable the more fleeting they are. Think of a ticket to a once-in-a-lifetime reunion of the Band.

  But objects that persist through time: these we do not want to be transient. Durable purchases like fridges and cars gain value precisely with their endurance and longevity. And when they finally expire they lose their value. If events habitually persisted with us like objects do, whether in actuality or simply in our mind, then their eventual passing, too, would be more destructive than lustrous.

  True, one key consolation for mortality, the “Holderlin strategy” discussed in Chapter 2, relies precisely on our learning to treat our life’s events—particularly its peak moments of accomplishment, say the high-school basketball championship game twenty years ago—as persisting objects. Let’s get our life’s pinnacle instances of achievement done as early as possible, the Holderlin strategy advises. That way death, when it comes, will arrive too late to interrupt them. And then let’s learn to spend the rest of our time on the planet savoring those moments as we would a trophy or a jewel that stays with us, instead of feeling like a has-been as they slip ever further into the past. That way, we won’t experience the itch to embark on new projects that will then be hostage to death. We will thus gain the fullest possible psychological access to Epicurus’s second consolation. Once death comes, not only we—but our life—will no longer be here to be harmed by it. After all, it will long since have been happily and sustainingly wrapped up.

  Yet this consolation, even if we can manage to find our way to it, comes at a price. It means that we will see life’s losses as far more devastating if, for whatever reason, those events that we have treated like objects eventually lose their meaning: if that championship season, with us for so many decades, finally relinquishes its ability to sustain us. For Coach in Jason Miller’s play, the big game twenty years before didn’t start receding into the past as soon it ended. It remained with him like the trophy itself, enshrined in his living-room cabinet. But then in the course of one catastrophic evening with his now tarnished boys, that “object,” that championship season, abruptly shatters. It dies. Coach realizes it’s all “history.” It was, he says, now speaking in the past tense, “a rare and beautiful thing.”17 And he bewails as anyone would the death of a rare and beautiful thing.

  Precisely because for most of us, events—our sweet children’s recitals, our championship seasons—vanish immediately into the past, life’s losses do not resemble death’s. They remain cause more for wistfulness than for grief. And that’s a good thing.

  I am glad, then, that I am moving ever forward in time, moment by moment, along with all other selves, even toward death. I am glad, in other words, that we are not free to move or stay put as we choose in time the way we can in space. For if we could stop in time as we liked while others moved on, then we would lose each other in life in a way we now can only when we die.

  And I am glad that the events of my life, even the most radiant ones, vanish moment by moment into the past, gone as soon as they’re done. Yes, knowing that they are ephemeral I often feel wistful as I see them slip back ever further in time. But it would be worse if they somehow stuck around for me to revisit and relive, if they persisted in time the way objects do. Then I would feel real grief when they finally died to me, the way I now do only with objects—and people—when they die.

  These two features of mortal existence—that our selves move together relentlessly into the future while the events of our life ceaselessly disappear into the past—are finally what bar life’s losses from ever resembling death’s. And while that fact doesn’t console me about death, it does console me about life.

  conclusion

  MY LAST ESPRESSO

  Four consolatory streams flow at us from the wisdom of the ages. Four strategies offer themselves for our consideration as we seek to reconcile ourselves with our mortal condition. If we look at things in the right way, we will see that:

  Death is benign.

  Mortality gives us all the goods that immortality would.

  Immortality would be malignant.

  Life gives us all the bads that death does.

  I have tried to follow each stream on its own winding course and along its various tributaries, commenting on the exotic sights seen along the way. It’s when they are taken together, though, that something more deeply revealing emerges. Something that remains invisible from the perspective of each, taken individually, materializes when they are viewed as a whole.

  *

  We are all moving, moment by moment in time, toward our deaths. And, moment by moment, the events of our lives vanish further and further back into the past. That’s how most of us see things. That’s our reality. It’s what cries out for consolation.

  But let’s consider the alternatives. And let’s not restrict ourselves to realistic options. After all, the question is whether reality itself should leave us disconsolate. Bundles of ego and anxiety that we are, we won’t be satisfied if our condition is merely the best that’s realistically possible. It has to be the best that’s (even barely) conceivable.

  So suppose, first off, that we were immortal. But beyond that, nothing else changed. In particular, suppose that we continued, as immortal selves, to move ever forward into the future, while the moments of our lives continued to slip remorselessly behind us into the past.

  Would immortality not then ultimately pose its very own choice of deaths?

  Consider the possibilities. Suppose, for instance, that our selves, forging ever onward in time, and the events of our lives, flowing ever backward in time, one day ceased to change, to bring us novelty. Suppose that our memories, desires, beliefs, emotional attachments, and commitments—the constituents of our self—no longer evolved. And suppose that the events of our lives, too, all came to resemble the same dull hum. Sooner or later, we’d feel as if we had seen and done all we cared to. Immortality would then take us to a liminal, deathlike realm of stupefying boredom.

  On the other hand, suppose that all the memories, feelings, attachments, beliefs, and plans that make up our self, along with all the life events that happened to us, did continuously and thoroughly change and churn and morph and turn over, presenting us with endless novelty. We wouldn’t be bored. But then immortality would simply entail a different kind of death: a repeated and utter cutting off of our previous selves and lives, indeed their termination and consignment to oblivion, in favor of new ones.

  What if we split the difference? Suppose that we managed to maintain the same trove of memories, values, tastes, feelings, and desires over endless time—so that instead of recurrently dying we remained the same essenti
al self—but that the events of our lives did somehow manage to throw incessant novelty at us, such that we cheated boredom. There’d still be a problem. Immortality would then make us feel ever-increasingly antiquated. We ourselves would have ceased to change while the world and its events continued to, growing ever stranger. There would arise within us an ever-increasingly mournful nostalgia for the past.

  By contrast, what if it was our selves that continued to change, regularly jettisoning all previous memories, plans, emotional attachments, beliefs, and desires, while the events of our lives no longer varied but simply came to resemble the same moment repeated over and over? Then immortality would seem to threaten a kind of perpetual dementia.

  Immortality, as long as our selves moved ever forward into the future while the events of our lives flowed back ever further into the past, would seem to be a box with no escape—a box whose four walls would comprise grossly distended facsimiles of what we mortals already experience in death and dying. The stuporous sleep of boredom. The complete annihilation of repeated self-disappearance. The ever-deepening antiquated feeling that leads to cascading nostalgia, which one writer likens to a “kind of living death.”1 The futile dementia that spells endless twilight. Immortality, on the twin assumptions that our selves continued moving forward into the future and the events of our lives continued fading back into the past, does look malignant. That’s why, when you scrutinize it, you will see that any benign scenario for immortality that fantasists have offered relies on denying one or the other of these two presumptions.

  So let’s now suppose not only that we were immortal. Let’s suppose as well that we no longer had to perpetually move forward in time, while the events of our lives no longer had to recede ever further into the past. What would that look like?

  Begin by imagining that we no longer had to move relentlessly forward into the future, moment by moment in lockstep with every other living creature. Imagine instead that we each could disperse as freely over time as we can over space. Suppose, for example, that as an immortal you could stay put for as long as you pleased at your favorite age or year. Meanwhile I, with my own unique needs or preferences, could continue on to a different age or year and then plant myself there for an indefinite spell.

  And now imagine too that the precious events of our lives—the time we scaled Everest, the budding stages of a blissful affair—no longer had to slip remorselessly back into the past. Suppose instead that they could somehow remain with us like cherished objects: jewels or talismans that we could fully experience as often as we liked. And then wouldn’t immortality be lovely? Wouldn’t it be far better than our current mortal lot?

  These are hard scenarios to get our mind around. And yet we have some clues. Dorian Gray, in a sense, shows us what it would mean for a self to stop moving forward in time. Dorian opts to cease aging physically if not psychologically. The result, though, is that he utterly cuts himself out of the common experience of humankind. He becomes lost to all others, who do continue moving forward in time. No longer part of the human race, Dorian becomes dead to them.

  And that makes perfect sense. After all, in our current reality, if a self stops moving forward in time while others continue on, it could only be because he has died. If we no longer all had to move together moment by moment through time while we were alive, then we would simply begin to lose each other during life in the way we now can only with death.

  T. Coraghessan Boyle’s short story “The Relive Box” imagines a society in which a new contraption has enabled people to stay as long as they want in a beloved day, week, or month in their life. The result is that family members and friends disengage from each other, die to each other, becoming lost in their own preferred years.2 Better, then, that we are all compelled to move together, in tandem moment by moment, ever forward in time.

  As for preventing a precious event in our life from slipping back in time once it’s happened, think again of Coach from That Championship Season. He manages to keep his old moment of glory, a long-ago victorious high-school championship game, alive with him as he moves through the decades. He treats it as a cherished object—a psychological if not a physical one like the trophy itself—that he spends time with daily. But then, over the course of one disastrous dinner party with his now debauched middle-aged boys, that precious moment crumbles. It dies to him. And what Coach then experiences is not the mere wistfulness we normally feel as precious moments, which we all know and accept as ephemeral, immediately begin to vanish back in time as soon as they happen. What he experiences is real grief—the kind of grief we feel when we lose a precious object, or person, that has accompanied us for a long time. He goes into mourning.

  It is, then, precisely our relentlessly moving together minute by minute into the future, while the events of our lives remorselessly vanish back minute by minute into the past, that saves human life from becoming riddled with intimations of death. If that wasn’t the reality, then deathlike losses would begin to permeate life, even if we didn’t actually die.

  But of course death is our reality. And so various bodies of thought try to console us through a different strategy. They claim that, even within our limited mortal existence, our selves do not necessarily have to move relentlessly forward in time toward our death. Nor do the moments of our lives inevitably have to slip ceaselessly through our fingers into the past. It all depends on how we look at things.

  Derek Parfit, for example, advances a Buddhist view. He dismisses, as an illusion, the idea that we are selves moving ever forward, moment by moment, toward death. There is no such self. And hence even though we die, there’s nothing that death necessarily destroys. Death, in fact, is benign. It should be far less disturbing to us than it is.

  Gordon Bell, the techno-guru, refuses to accept that the events of our lives must necessarily flow ever further back into the past, moment by moment, inexorably out of reach. Instead we can record and digitize every single one of those events—everything we have thought, felt, and experienced minute by minute. We, and especially others on into the unending future, can then repeatedly revisit them. Even though we must die, all the contents of our mind can live on indefinitely, allowing us to gain an intimation of immortality, mortal though we may be.

  But consolatory ideas like Parfit’s, Bell’s, and others I have examined come at too high a psychological price for most of us. I wonder, in fact, whether there’s even something deathly about them: whether they give up the game and the ghost at the same time. For us to see death as benign, in the way that Parfit does, for example, we must view our self as already dead. For us to accept that mortality could ever intimate immortality in the way that Bell thinks it can, we must suck what’s most ineffable, intimate, and precious—most alive—out of the flowing moments of our life, freeze-drying them into digitized bits and bytes so that they become comprehensible to strangers eons hence.

  That’s it. Those are the options: Either we die or we are immortal. And either our selves move relentlessly forward in time while the moments of our lives slip continually backward out of reach, or else we gain the capacities to stop moving forward in time and to keep the precious moments of our lives from flowing ever backward in time beyond our grasp. Of all possible combinations, none is better than the one we have. We die, and our selves move inexorably forward in time while the moments of our lives ineluctably vanish into the past. In fact, it may be the option that contains the least amount of death.

  At that most fundamental level, the bundle of ego and anxiety that dwells within me feels consoled about our mortal condition. Not cheered. But consoled. I—you, we, humankind—got the best deal imaginable.

  *

  Philip Larkin complained of specious stuff—attempts to console us for mortality that make logical sense but don’t ring true psychologically. Is this what I have offered?

  In one sense, yes. But in another, no. Yes, because what I have suggested isn’t likely to warm us emotionally. We can accept that we got the best deal imag
inable and still ache at the thought that one day we will drink an espresso for the last time, or see a sunset for the last time, or make love for the last time.

  “Last” is an interesting word. It is at once an adjective, as in “my last espresso,” and a verb, as in “I’d like to make this espresso last.” The two senses of “last” are diametric opposites. The adjective implies termination and the verb continuation. The very syllable seems to rebel against itself. It’s as if “last” knows, given the kind of creatures that we are, that we could not accept its adjectival meaning alone without the hope implied by the verb. Uncut by the verb, the adjective by itself would simply be too painful for us to fully contemplate. It’s poetic license, I know, but I like to think that there’s something evocative here. Something that hints, in the marrow of our linguistic structure, at the basic emotional trauma that death brings, and that no consolation for mortality could ever reach.

  But no, in another sense the consolation I have offered is not specious. It might not grab us emotionally any more than other consolations do. But it is more psychologically real. Brilliant as other consolations can be as a matter of logical argumentation, many don’t ring psychologically true because they contradict our fundamental mindset. They try to obscure—to coax us out of—our sense of ourselves as moving ever forward in time toward our deaths while the moments of our life continually ebb ever further into the past. They insist that we can and should throw off this mindset in order to be consoled. I can’t. Nor do I think most of us can. And so I have tried instead to work within that psychology, to remain true to it. To find consolation within it.

  That very psychology, of course—that our selves move ever forward in time toward our death, while the events of our lives slip, moment by moment, through our fingers into the past—is precisely what cries out for consolation. But it is also, finally, the consoling answer to its own cry. It’s good that things are that way. It’s the best we could ever dream of, if we want to live at all.