by Andrew Stark
Willy is a death denier. Till the very last, he is still planting seeds whose saplings he will never see. Yes, he knows he is about to kill himself, he knows it’s “late.” But even so he can’t wrap his life up. Instead he keeps, so to speak, his pedal to the metal as if it were business as usual right up till the end. He gives no thought to that end itself, he has nothing to say about his death even as it looms. As long as he is here, his death remains out of view, and he continues to plunge furiously into the ongoing business of his life.
And in a way he succeeds. His life does survive him, his projects are realized. The final payment on the mortgage gets made. Linda now has a secure pension; there is a stake for Biff. And with Willy out of the picture, the boys no longer have any reason to stay away from Linda or each other, thus healing the family unit. His life forges on so robustly in his absence that Linda, at the funeral, finds it difficult to shed a tear. “Forgive me, dear. I can’t cry. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t cry. . . . It seems to me that you’re just on another trip. I keep expecting you. Willy, dear, I can’t cry.”
Willy does, though, achieve something more, something that Ivan Ilych does not. One of Willy’s happiest moments comes earlier in the play when, as he imagines himself talking to his brother Ben, he fantasizes about his own funeral: “Ben,” Willy rhapsodizes, “that funeral will be massive! They’ll come from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire! . . . [Biff will] see what I am, Ben! He’s in for a shock, that boy!”9
What purpose does this bit of magical thinking serve for Willy? Well, two things perhaps. First, Willy rapturously imagines his life being eulogized, elegized, capped—wrapped up. All the wonderful things they will say about him, what a fitting conclusion, what a high note to end the story on. Second, although his life is wrapped up, Willy himself still manages to be there, as we all must imagine ourselves to be whenever we visualize our own funerals, observing the ceremony from some floating vantage point in the air. His life is done, marked, and missed. Yet he himself somehow still survives, continuing on to enjoy the adulation and acclamation. The best of both worlds.
This is just a wish. Perhaps it’s a wish to which death deniers, as we all are to some degree, are particularly prone. But the reality is just the other way around. It is Willy himself who’s gone, while his life continues to soldier on as if he himself had long since ceased to be relevant to it. And just for that reason, he himself will not be missed—not deeply, not in the gut. Because his life so resoundingly marches on, his absence is hard to get a handle on, to viscerally feel. And so Linda can’t cry.10
Hey, I’m Not Done Yet
As long as we are here, death isn’t. And then as soon as death comes, we are no longer here to be harmed by it. As logical propositions, the two sentences in Epicurus’s consolation for mortality are hard to deny. They also seem utterly consistent with each other. No daylight appears between them. And yet as Epicurus realized, and as contemporary philosophers who debate them as metaphysical propositions recognize, though logically compelling they are far from psychologically gripping. And so they fall far short of consoling us.
We can, though, take measures to render them more psychologically convincing. There are ways, as I will suggest, of trying to live our lives so as to make Epicurus’s two sentences more like meaningful realities than arid truisms. But a funny thing then happens. The kind of life we would have to lead to make the first of Epicurus’s sentences psychologically persuasive—as long as we are here, death won’t yet have come and so cannot harm us—conflicts, profoundly, with the kind of life we would have to lead to gain any kind of psychological comfort from the second: as soon as death does come, we will have departed and so no longer remain present to be hurt by it. The more the two phrases stand a chance of consoling us at least to some extent, the less coherent they become. As they grow more deeply psychological and less purely logical, they become less consistent and more mutually contradictory.
To grasp this, consider Epicurus’s first sentence, which I will from now on call “Epicurus’s first consolation”: as long as we are here, our death cannot be. This is undeniable as a dry, objective assertion. But if we want to make it a vibrant subjective reality, we must (as many of us do to some degree) lead an Ivan Ilych kind of life, taking on new cases, making new plans for our children, daring our friends to top our latest score in cards—or engaging in fresh romantic adventures, embarking on new political campaigns, training for ever more strenuous bike races—and engross ourselves in all of these activities to such a degree that our death becomes but a faint, indistinct glimmer on the outer edges of our mind. Because we are so very much present, death gets pushed aside, totally out of the picture. It becomes psychologically and not just logically absent for as long as we are here.
But there’s an irony. Yes, we will have lived so as to make Epicurus’s first consolation—as long as we are here, death isn’t—as psychologically real for ourselves as it can be. But in doing so we will have made Epicurus’s second consolation—once death does arrive, we will no longer be here to be hurt by it—about as psychologically remote as it can be. Think of Ivan. For as long as he is here death is never present—never present to him subjectively, in his thoughts, let alone objectively, as a fact. And so he never gives any consideration to wrapping things up in advance of his demise. The result? Large parts of himself—all the objective parts, the facts in the world that constitute the raw material of his life such as important legal files and betrothals and card matches—will still very much be here, ongoing even after death comes. And it hurts him deeply to think that other parts of himself—his subjective consciousness, his cognitive and emotional capacities—won’t any longer be present to relish or cherish or pursue those cases and weddings and games.11
In this psychological sense, then, it’s not true—as Epicurus’s second consolation would have it—that once death comes, there is nothing of Ivan left and hence that he can’t be harmed. And that’s precisely because Ivan has lived his life so as to take maximum advantage of Epicurus’s first consolation: that as long as he was around, there was going to be no hint of death.
So what about Epicurus’s second consolation? What kind of life would we have to live in order to find ourselves maximally consoled by the idea that once death comes, we will no longer be here to be harmed by it? Certainly not Ivan’s.
We wouldn’t continually start new endeavors and embark on new projects, as Ivan does, with the risk that our life will continue on without us, long after death ushers our selves out of the picture, depriving us of the capacity to guide and enjoy it. Instead, we’d try to be fast out of the gate. We’d get all our endeavors and projects completed in a hurry, wrapping our life up as soon as possible long before we ourselves take our leave. We’d lobby to get the biggest cases we could try over and done with. We’d push our daughter to marry early. We’d establish a record of uninterrupted card-game victories that no one in our circle could ever match. That way, death would be powerless to harm us by cutting short our plans or taking us from projects that are half-completed. Instead, we’d live according to the principle Holderlin invoked in his poem “To the Fates”: “A single summer grant me . . . and a single autumn for fully ripened song . . . once what I am bent on, my poetry, is accomplished, [b]e welcome then, stillness of the shadows’ world!”
If we adopted what the philosopher Ben Bradley calls the “Holderlin strategy,” we would make a big success of ourselves as early in our lives as we could.12 We’d get our accomplishments—professional triumphs, romantic affairs, lyric poetry, military glory, hiking to the top of Everest, biking the Tour de France, whatever—engraved on the record. Then we would relax and enjoy the world’s simple pleasures—such as eating, drinking, and making love—that are not graven on the record but that disappear with each day’s sunset, creating the need for them anew. We’d know that death can never destroy the more “important” stuff, the accomplishments that have now moved safely into the past, preserved in am
ber for us to reflect upon with a secure smile on our faces. And we’d know too that the daily setting of the sun—in other words, life itself—regularly washes away the other stuff, the pleasure of sex or the satisfaction of hunger, so that the only way to quench our need for them permanently would be to die. We’d thus ease into a mindset accepting of death.
If we lived this way, then Epicurus’s second consolation—once our death comes, we ourselves will no longer be present to be affected by it—would not simply be a dry logical truism. More important to our psychic well-being, long before our death comes, the life we wanted to lead would be over and done with, invulnerable now to the Reaper whenever he might appear. Any number of people live a life that follows this pattern. Some are able to get it done very early: Björn Borg sought to put it all behind him—five consecutive Wimbledon championships—by retiring at twenty-six. Philip Roth called it a day much later, giving up writing at eighty and becoming “the only living novelist to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America.”13 Like the writer Clive James, those who seek to ensure that their lives are over before death rears its head tend to talk of themselves—and certainly their lives—in the past tense: “I didn’t get a bad ride,” James says; “I managed to square the circle.”14
Suppose that we follow this kind of path. We might well reap the psychic advantages of Epicurus’s second consolation—that when death comes, neither we nor our lives will still be here to be harmed by it. But there’d be a cost. We would then live in a way that flouts Epicurus’s first consolation, according to which as long as we are here, death can have no contact with us and so is nothing to us. For in fact death would be constantly present. Not as an objective reality of course. But subjectively, in our psyche.
When I read the memoirs or biographies of individuals who have set their lives in granite, making psychologically real to themselves Epicurus’s second consolation—once death comes, nothing of their lives can any longer be harmed by it—they seem, like Henry Kissinger, for example, as if they are dearly seeking the chance to experience their own posthumous glory. They want to know firsthand what it would be like to look back on their own lives once they’re over. They aspire to live in a kind of death zone that they can experience for themselves—one with all the tranquility and other good things they associate with death but without the actual reality—by retiring at their peak and then reflecting on and burnishing their own success.
But in so doing they precisely want it to be the case that even while they remain here among the living, their death has in a sense already happened—contrary to the spirit of Epicurus’s first consolation: as long as we are here, death cannot be. Perhaps that’s why Björn Borg, as he approached the end of his tennis career, looked as if he were already wearing a “death mask.”15
“In the coming years, I have two great calamities to face, death and biography,” Philip Roth says. “Let’s hope the first comes first.”16 But in fact it already has. Roth is famously aware of death. In fact, he invited death into the center of his mind from the outer reaches decades ago. And so he ended his life at eighty, giving himself some time to enjoy it posthumously before he himself departs. His life completed, Roth can now help write its complete story—his own biography. He’s collaborating on it.
Let me return now to the kind of life we would have to lead to make Epicurus’s first consolation—as long as we are here, death can’t be—as psychologically real to ourselves as we possibly could. What, really, do we have to do to banish death so convincingly from our concerns that it becomes a benign irrelevancy? I will turn to Epicurus’s second consolation in the next chapter.
The Late Me
In 2006, the NYU philosopher J. David Velleman delivered a charming lecture at Amherst College called “So It Goes.” It’s the most penetrating account I have seen of the life we must lead if Epicurus’s first consolation—that as long as we are here, death can’t be and so is truly irrelevant to us—is to take full psychological hold.17
Suppose, Velleman says, that you likened the relationship between your “self” and “time” to the relationship between your body and space. Imagine your body standing up in a particular space—say your living room. Even though your head is closer than your feet to the ceiling, you would never say that your body itself moves closer and closer to the ceiling over the space from your feet to your head. Likewise: even though your eighties are closer to your death than your twenties, there’s no reason to think that you yourself move closer and closer to your death over the course of time from your twenties to your eighties.
What exactly does this mean? To begin with, we must understand that Velleman offers this unconventional image in order to challenge a more conventional one: that you are a self who, much like a jogger, runs the course of your life over time from birth to death, with different parts of that course coming into view as you chug along. If that’s how you see things then obviously, as you travel the road of your life, you yourself, the jogger, will get closer and closer to death. Death will loom larger and larger on the horizon, creeping ever more menacingly into view, thus deflating any kind of consolation that rests on the idea that as long as you are here, death isn’t and so is an irrelevancy.
On this conventional image, then, your life is stretched out in time much as a road stretches out in space. And you—your self, the runner—are pacing through it. What Velleman suggests, in effect, is that you should instead view your self as extended out in time in exactly the way your life is: that you conceive of the two, your self and your life, as stretched out side by side. The part of your self that exists on April 23, 2014, from 4 to 5 PM enjoys the part of your life that’s unfolding on April 23, 2014, from 4 to 5 PM—say the coffee you’re sharing with a friend. Then a different and subsequent part of your self—the part that exists on April 23, 2014, from 5 to 6 PM—savors the next part of your life, the ride home you are giving your six-year-old daughter. Each part of your self lives only in its own moment of your life.
On Velleman’s unconventional image, then, there never is a “you”—there never is a whole, entire self—that is moving moment by moment toward death over time. There are only different parts of you at different times. After all, there is no “you” moving inch by inch toward the ceiling in space either. There are only different parts of you—knees, stomach, shoulders—at different heights. No reason, then, for you to think of death as something to which you steadily grow nearer, any more than the ceiling is something to which you steadily grow closer. You can fully avail yourself of Epicurus’s first consolation: as long as any part of your self is here, death is utterly irrelevant. Not only is it not present. You are not even moving toward it.18
Sleight of hand? Velleman’s perspective, and similar “perdurantist” views, makes some other philosophers uneasy. D. H. Mellor captures the nub of the issue. Churchill wrote a book called My Early Life, Mellor notes. He did not title it “Early Me.”19 “I” myself do not come in different parts, earlier ones and then later ones, in the way my life does. Instead, “I” as a whole experience each part of my life at its different points, first the earlier ones, then the later ones. Certainly, if Mellor is right—if it’s not just a part of myself but my entire self that exists at 4 PM on April 23, and again at 5 PM on April 23, and so forth—then Velleman is wrong. “I” do grow closer to death as my life stretches out, because I as a whole am running through it.
Let’s clear one thing up first: we might not refer to the young Churchill as the early Churchill, as Mellor suggests. But we certainly would at one point have referred to the dead Churchill as the late Churchill. Why so?
Whatever the historical origins of this usage of “late”—and they remain unclear—here is a contemporary interpretation. “Late” means two things. First, it means tardy. If someone is late, it generally means that he is not here yet, although he was expected to be. And that might be just how we feel about someone who has died. Like Joan Didion, we might have th
e persisting sense that he is merely delayed out of town but on his way, not actually dead. He’s late.
But of course, this sense of “late” works for a deceased person only if he has died recently. It makes less and less sense to say—or feel—that we are expecting a dead person to arrive, that he is simply tardy, as time passes. And this is where the second meaning of “late” comes in: as a synonym not for “tardy” but for “recent,” as in, “It’s been raining around here of late.” While we might have used the phrase “the late Churchill” in the year following Churchill’s 1965 death, when he had only recently died—when we could still say that he was here of late—we wouldn’t anymore. So the two senses of “late”—not yet here (tardy) but expected to be; was just here (recently) though is no longer—infuse one another in a kind of double image. We think only of the recently dead as tardy, of the lately dead as late. Perhaps that’s why we save the word “late” just for them.
For Velleman, though, just because it sounds strange doesn’t mean it’s mistaken to talk of an “early me”—an early part of myself—that experiences my early life. Or of another part of myself—“mid me”—that experiences my midlife. Or of still another part—“late me”—that experiences my late life. What would no longer make sense, if we were remaining faithful to Velleman’s imagery, would be to call the early part of my self my “younger self,” or the mid part my “middle-aged self,” or the later part my “older self.” That would imply that my self as a whole gets older, it’s been around longer, as time passes. But in fact any part of my self that comes into existence later in life—and of course for Velleman a part is all that exists at any given time—is no older, it’s not been around for any longer, than any other part of my self ever is. The part of my self that exists from 10 to 11 AM on January 29, 2015, doesn’t grow any older than did the part that existed fifteen years earlier, from 10 to 11 AM on January 29, 2000. Nor does that later part grow any closer to death during its existence than does the earlier part. As Montaigne asks, “Why are you afraid of your last day? It brings you no closer to your death than any other did.”20