The Consolations of Mortality

by Andrew Stark

  THE CONSOLATIONS OF MORTALITY

  ANDREW STARK

  The Consolations of Mortality

  Making Sense of Death

  Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

  NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

  Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of James Wesley Cooper of the Class of 1865, Yale College.

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  Quotation from “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” from the book The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1923, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright © 1951 by Robert Frost. Used by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Deborah

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  PART 1 | DEATH IS BENIGN

  one. Attending Your Own Funeral

  two. How to Rest on Your Laurels

  three. Look Who’s Calling Himself Nothing

  four. Bucket Lists

  PART 2 | MORTALITY INTIMATES IMMORTALITY

  five. Retiring Your Jersey

  six. Regrets? How Much Time Do You Have?

  seven. You Never Know

  eight. Making Your Mark

  PART 3 | IMMORTALITY WOULD BE MALIGNANT

  nine. Is This All There Is?

  ten. Still Life

  eleven. A Wistful Backward Glance

  twelve. Making the Sun Run

  Interlude. Mortality versus Immortality: Why Not the Right to Choose?

  PART 4 | LIFE INTIMATES DEATH

  thirteen. The Big Sleep

  fourteen. Stardust and Moonshine

  fifteen. Every Time I Say Goodbye, I Die a Little

  Conclusion My Last Espresso

  Notes

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful to Hamish Clark, Isaac Clark, Fardowsa Hashi, Vladimir Helwig, Gavin Lee, and Yuki Nishimura for their superb research assistance, and to Jennifer Banks, Laura Davulis, Heather Gold, and Jeffrey Schier of Yale University Press for their support and wise editorial advice. I also thank Don Herzog, Mark Lilla, Patrick Luciani, William Ian Miller, Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin, Deborah Moores, Cliff Orwin, Donna Orwin, Rachel Stark, and Zoe Stark for their valuable and insightful comments on earlier versions. I have tried to implement their sage suggestions. I also, with deep appreciation, remind them of Otis Redding’s great truth: “I can’t do what ten people tell me to do/So I guess I’ll remain the same.”

  THE CONSOLATIONS OF MORTALITY

  INTRODUCTION

  For those of us who are not believers—for those of us who suspect that death really is the final curtain—the wisdom of the ages has generated four great consolations for mortality: four distinct ways of persuading us to accept, maybe even appreciate, the fact that we will die. None of the four relies on religious conviction. None invokes the possibility of an afterlife. Each comes in multiple exotic guises. All have been around, in some form or another, for a long time. Centuries. Millennia, even, with sprawling roots in the ancient west, the timeless east, and the modern world.

  Do they work? Can any one of the four really deliver on its promise to make us feel content, even at peace, with our inevitable demise? It’s an important question. In fact, it’s an urgent one.

  In 1783 a French noblewoman sat in her carriage at the Tuileries, observing for the first time a hot-air balloon rise into the sky: a demonstration, she thought, of the kind of breakthroughs that science was on the verge of making. But the lady wasn’t happy. “Oh yes, now it’s certain!” she cried: “One day they’ll learn to keep people alive forever, but I shall already be dead!”1

  Given the pace and promise of biomedical innovation, a moment may well arrive when great numbers of our species start to feel like the lady: sensing that open-ended human longevity looms as an increasingly imminent possibility, yet fearing that they themselves might just miss out on it. For all who hold this worldview, the question of how to come to terms with their deaths will assume a desperate psychological urgency. And what if such a moment doesn’t arrive any time soon? What if the riddle of mortality continues to elude cutting-edge science? Then the matter of reckoning with our finality will simply maintain the paramount importance it’s always had.

  Either way, we will want consolation. But are the four approaches that the ages bequeath to us up to the task? Does one perhaps work better than the others? Or is it just possible that something else entirely—maybe something that emerges only when the four are considered together—makes a compelling case that dying is better for us than any conceivable alternative?

  By “us,” I mean we bundles of ego and anxiety who love life, believe that death spells permanent obliteration, and live in the early twenty-first century. Strong egos that we are, we anguish as our precious selves move, inescapably and second by second, forward in time toward their impending ends. Lovers of life that we are, we agonize as its moments slip one by one, through our fingers, back into the irrecoverable past. How could we ever come to terms with such a reality?

  The first of the four consolations tells us forthrightly that if we look at our situation in the right light, we will see that death itself is actually a benign or even a good thing. Philosophers from Epicurus to Heidegger to contemporary Buddhists have found different glimmers of this silver lining in our mortal condition. Epicurus, for example, counseled that the relationship between a person and his death is roughly akin—if I can use an analogy that was unavailable to Epicurus himself—to the relationship between Superman and Clark Kent. Whenever one is present, the other is nowhere to be seen. As long as a person is alive, his death has not yet happened. And then once his death occurs, he is no longer around to suffer it. Si
nce our self can never encounter its own demise, Epicurus concluded, death should cause us absolutely no concern. It’s entirely and utterly benign. The trick simply lies, Epicurus felt, in allowing the logical force of this observation to overcome the psychological terror that death inspires.

  Existentialists and Buddhists assign death a benign countenance for a different kind of reason. As they see it, the relationship between death and the self is more like the Beatles’ songwriting partnership between Lennon and McCartney. Only if Lennon is present in the credits will you find McCartney there too. And if there is no McCartney in the byline, then there is no Lennon either. Likewise, only because death is present in the world, existentialists say, are selves present too. Because there is no such thing as the self to begin with, Buddhists counter, there is no such thing as death either.

  Why, for existentialists, are death and the self joined at the hip? Because only if we remain constantly aware that our time is limited will we feel any urgency to get started in the world, make hard choices about what’s important to us, and carve out the narrative arc of our own singular self. If by contrast no final deadline loomed, then we would endlessly dally and dawdle, failing to make anything of ourselves—or even make our selves in the first place. If we think about it deeply enough, we will see that mortality is thus a good thing. It’s necessary to our very existence. Only because death exists does our self exist too.

  Buddhism, by contrast, tells us that the self is an illusion. And so death, which is supposedly the destruction of the self, must be naught as well. There’s nothing that it terminates. If there is no self, then all we are is a chain of moment-by-moment memories, experiences, hopes, dreams, thoughts, aspirations, and feelings over time. And all of them can survive our death, living on into the future in anyone who continues to share them. So we lose nothing to death. The trick lies simply in learning how to accept this truth.

  Despite their stark differences, what philosophers espousing this first consolatory stream all argue—whether they are Epicurean, existentialist, or Buddhist—is that death is benignly irrelevant, maybe even positively good, for the person who dies. And there’s no reference to an afterlife to be found in the lot of them.

  The second consolatory stream flows in a different direction. According to its various advocates, all of the good things that we associate with death’s alternative—namely, immortality—are actually fully available to us within the confines of our mortal life. Within mortal life as it is, we can acquire all the intimations of immortality we could ever desire. Since a well-lived mortal life offers everything that immortality could, death deprives us of nothing.

  Think of the Microsoft techno-guru Gordon Bell. He promises that one day soon, thanks to 24/7 real-time video and audio recording, we will be able to upload everything that ever happens to us—in effect, the entire contents of our memories—online, to be preserved forever. E. M. Forster was crushed by the thought that once he expired, so too would all the precious reminiscences he cherished of his beloved mother. But, Bell claims, we can now obtain at least that particular benefit of immortality—the eternal preservation of our own irreplaceable trove of knowledge about the past—even if we die. We can all, Bell says, “off-load our memory” and thus gain “a kind of immortality.”2

  What other goods do we associate with continuing to live on indefinitely? Well, not only do we want to preserve what we and only we know about the past—our treasured memories—but we also want to know all about the future: we want to know every secret of the universe and God and consciousness that our species might one day discover. We also want to continue not just to know but to shape the future, to stamp our imprint on it, instead of being condemned, as we mortals sadly are, to having all traces of our existence eventually fade away as if we had never lived. And we will always need more time to shape not just the future but the past, to stamp our imprint on it, instead of being condemned, as we mortals distressingly are, to leaving mistakes unrepaired, regrets unamended, and defeats unvindicated.

  But there are those who argue that if we look at matters in the right way, we will see that each of these good things, too, can be had within a mortal life every bit as much as we could get them (and maybe part of the issue is that we exaggerate how much we could get them) in an immortal life. Death could vanish, and we mortals would gain nothing—at least nothing of any value—that we don’t already have. We should be consoled by this thought.

  Immortality not only comes with good things, though. It’s also wedded to some very bad ones. You might think that endless life is what you want. But beware of what you wish for. On the third broad stream of consolation, immortality itself would actually be an awful fate, and so mortality is much to be preferred. Here again, thinkers have offered an array of possibilities.

  Assume, for example, that as an immortal you retained an on going memory of everything that you experienced over the millennia. Then would you not come to feel, sooner or later as time marched on, as if you had seen everything that there is to see? And suppose, too, that you retained the same unvarying set of core desires and values as thousands upon tens of thousands of years passed. Then would you not come to feel, sooner or later, as if you had done all that you ever cared to do? And so wouldn’t immortality ultimately spell interminable, excruciating boredom?

  Suppose, though, that you dodged that fate. Suppose, as an immortal, that your oldest memories regularly vanished into the mists of time, so that the world always seemed to offer fresh experiences—experiences you wouldn’t remember having had before. And suppose too that your desires and values repeatedly turned over, to be replaced by entirely new sets of ambitions and aspirations to pursue. Then, yes, you might well cheat boredom. But it would also be as if you were periodically dying to be reborn as someone totally different: someone with remembrances and goals utterly unrecognizable to your prior self, whose own memories and passions would in turn have been completely eradicated, consigned to oblivion. And then would immortality really be any different from mortality?

  Still others say: maybe immortality would split the difference. Suppose that as an immortal you retained all of your memories from the earliest days onward, and that all your original desires and values, too, persisted indefinitely. You would certainly continue to be the same person. But suppose as well that novel challenges still continued to confront you, thanks to the disruptive mindsets of new generations or the ceaseless upheavals of a volatile biophysical universe. You would never be bored either. And yet even here—with a stable memory, consistent desires, and a continuously novel flow of life events—there’d be a problem with living forever. Sooner or later you would come to feel profoundly antiquated. You’d feel haunted by your memories of bygone days and mired in your old-fashioned desires and values, while the world hurtled on in directions you wouldn’t understand or appreciate. You’d become terminally nostalgic.

  The only remaining immortality scenario would seem to be one in which your memories periodically disappeared to be superseded by entirely new ones, and your desires and values repeatedly fell away over time to be supplanted by wholly unrelated ones, and yet not much that’s new actually ever happened to you. But how enviable would that kind of unending life be? Its closest cousin in mortal life—unstable memory, inconstant desires, rigidly repetitive flow of life events—seems to be a kind of dementia.

  Maybe, these various braided strands of thought suggest, immortality would be nothing but a kind of box. No matter where they looked, immortal humans would ultimately face a wall: crushing boredom, multiple serial personalities, bitter nostalgia, futile dementia. Perhaps, then, we mortals in fact have it pretty good: as good as it could ever get. And that’s some consolation.

  A fourth and final consolatory stream takes yet a different tack. It reminds us that the principal evils we associate with being dead routinely happen to us in life anyway. Within life—this vale of tears—we already face everything that we dread about death. In fact life, with its losses, is itself n
othing but an intimation of death. List all the evils that you think death inflicts. You will see that life, sooner or later, deals them out as well. If we were clear-eyed about this reality, then death would cease to be a source of terror.

  Think of one of death’s most stinging deprivations: our having to part forever from the people and things we love. This happens in life all the time anyway. “Husbands walk out, wives walk out,” says Joan Didion.3 We lose cherished jobs, beloved homes, treasured keepsakes, life-sustaining ideals and convictions all the time. Goodbyes are endemic to life, with every turn in the wheel of fortune, just as much as they are to death: so says the fourth consolation for our mortal condition.

  Of course, there’s one goodbye that death specializes in and that life seems unable to intimate: the goodbye to our own individual consciousness itself, not simply to all of the people and pursuits and places and possessions that populate it. And yet not only does life, too, contain its own periods when we bid adieu to our consciousness—hence the reference to death as the “big sleep,” which I will discuss—but it threatens something more. Consider the visionaries who have recently led the fight against death, such as Ray Kurzweil, Marvin Minsky, and Hans Moravec. At some point, they say, human life will become “post-human.” By uploading our minds onto supercomputers we will “merge” or “meld” into a single, eternal, universal consciousness of immense power, opening up dazzling insights into hidden patterns of the cosmos that at present remain beyond our ken.

  Let’s suppose that what these futurists sketchily foresee does come to pass. Isn’t what they herald not so much a form of immortality as it is the final frontier in life’s intimation of death’s losses? After all, individual consciousness—what it is we most value in life—would eventually perish in (post)human life, with its single universal consciousness, every bit as much as it does now with death. It’s just that what disappears would be the “individual” part, not the “consciousness” part. Perhaps we are deeply fortunate to be living mortals now, in the early twenty-first century, before the posthuman era commences. And that’s some consolation.