by Andrew Stark
What does this have to do with Epicurus’s first consolation? Suppose, Velleman says, that we accept with Epicurus that as long as we are here in any way, shape, or form, death must remain offstage—and so in that sense is nothing to us. Even so, Velleman says, it would still make sense for us to feel “anxiety about [our] inexorable approach to death”: the fact that our terminus looms ever larger on the horizon, that we are ineluctably, moment by moment, approaching our end—even if, in the final moment, we will disappear just as death arrives and so won’t actually encounter it.21 We could banish that anxiety, and thus truly feel that death is nothing to us for as long as we’re here, only if we no longer saw ourselves as moving forward in time toward it. And so to fully access Epicurus’s first consolation, Velleman concludes, we must buy into the particular analogy he offers. Our self, in fact, doesn’t move forward in time at all. It simply stretches out over time, its different parts occupying their own different moments. In just the same way our body, say, or a statue, doesn’t move ever upward over space. It simply stretches out over space, its different parts occupying their own different places.
It’s a stimulating if somewhat mind-bending idea. But it poses a puzzle. Very few of us look at our selves in the way Velleman recommends. And yet most of us happen to be quite adept at forgetting—at shutting out of our minds—the fact that we are drawing closer to death moment by moment. We do manage to treat our finitude as an irrelevancy in our day-to-day life. We rarely operate as if death bulked ever larger on the horizon with the passing of each day. Most of us are Ivans to some extent. How do we accomplish that?
The surprising answer: precisely because, contrary to Velleman, we do not—in fact we cannot—treat our self’s relationship to time as if it were like a body’s relationship to space.
Think of the image of the self that Velleman rejects: our self running the race course of our life such that death looms ever larger in front of us. It’s true that when we are running a real race course, a distant object—say a mountain on the far horizon—does grow ever larger in our view. Our eyes give us a sense that we are getting closer to distant spatial objects, via their increasing size and clarity, as we approach them. Our mind’s eye, however, fails to give us a similar sense that we are getting closer to distant temporal events, including our death, as we approach them. We don’t, in our minds, experience future events—we don’t visualize them—as becoming progressively larger and clearer over time as we draw nearer to them.22 And so death deniers like Ivan find it easy to conclude, along the lines of Epicurus’s first consolation, that death has nothing to do with them. Their imagination—that flawed faculty—doesn’t convey a real and vibrant sense of death looming progressively bigger and sharper even as they jog toward it. Until perhaps, as for Ivan, it is right in front of them.
It’s helpful to couple this observation with another one, about events not in the future but in the past. When we look back at a particular event from time gone by, we don’t see the intervening years. A memorable incident from long ago can thus feel (as we often say) as if it happened yesterday, as if not much in the way of time has intermediated. By contrast, we would never say of an object at a long distance behind us in space that it’s “as if it were right next to us.” We retain a full perceptual sense of all the terrain that intervenes. Distant events in our temporal rearview mirror, however, often appear closer than they are, the past shorter than it is. Our memories fail to give us a sense of the decades in between. And so as we move through our life, the time we have put behind us can continue to feel shorter than the time that still remains—until, perhaps, death is right in front of us.
As we run the temporal “race course” of our lives, then, our flawed imaginations make the end of the journey seem perpetually farther away than it is. And our gappy memories make the beginning seem consistently nearer than it is. We thus find it easy, like Ivan, to deny our movement forward in time from birth to death. When we run a spatial race course, by contrast, the end of the journey appears perpetually nearer and the beginning consistently farther away.
We could make death irrelevant, Velleman says. All we have to do is deeply, truly come to see that no more does our self move through time toward death than our body moves through space toward the ceiling. But most of us already make death irrelevant. And we do so precisely because we fail to perceive our self moving through time toward death in the way we perceive our body moving through space toward the horizon.
Day to day, our memories and imaginations conspire to muffle our sense that we are moving ever forward in time toward death. That muffling is quite effective—so much so that we aren’t totally desperate for a radical alternative like Velleman’s. But the sense we have of ourselves moving ever forward in time toward our ends is also, finally, deeply ingrained; we couldn’t embrace a radical alternative like Velleman’s even if we wanted to.
We can’t view our self as stationary in time in the way an object—a statue, say—might be stationary in space. We simply aren’t, as Velleman himself at one point acknowledges, psychologically wired to do so, certainly not we early twenty-first-century bundles of ego and anxiety. Day to day we might be Ivans, “little busy bee[s],” as Edmund White says. Yet at three in the morning, in the proverbial “dark night of the soul,” we know we are relentlessly moving toward our end.23 For most of us, Epicurus’s first consolation, on which as long as we are here death isn’t, will finally have little psychological purchase.24
two
HOW TO REST ON YOUR LAURELS
The two consolations embodied in Epicurus’s famous observation—as long as we are here death can’t be, and once death does come we are no longer here—seem logically tight with each other. But, as we have seen, they conflict as recommendations for living our life.
Consider: to take full advantage of Epicurus’s second consolation—once death comes, we will no longer be here to be harmed by it—we must hasten to wrap our life up before the Reaper comes. The goal would be to leave him no hostages, to live according to the “Holderlin strategy.” Recall, from the previous chapter, Holderlin’s plea: a “single summer grant me . . . once . . . my poetry is accomplished, [b]e welcome then, stillness of the shadows’ world!” Once our accomplishments are done, nothing—not even death—can take them away. Epicurus’s second consolation, which I consider in this chapter, will then have maximal force. Death will arrive, only to find that not just we, but our lives too, are no longer present to be harmed by it. But the price, for anyone who follows the Holderlin strategy, is that Epicurus’s first consolation—as long as we are here, death can’t be—is no longer psychologically available.
Why not? Well, consider Jason Miller’s 1972 play That Championship Season. A high-school basketball coach brandishes a trophy to his winning team at their twenty-year reunion: “See the names engraved on it!” Coach bellows at the men. “I carved your names in silver, last forever, forever, never forget that.”1 The greatest moment in the men’s lives—in fact, their lives themselves—finished twenty years earlier. There’s nothing anymore of importance for death to interrupt. Even the Reaper can’t expunge the names carved in the trophy. As Seneca said, their kind of life “can neither be troubled nor snatched away,” even by death. It is an “everlasting and unanxious possession.” The teammates have total access to Epicurus’s second consolation: when death comes, not only they—but their lives—will no longer be there to be harmed by it.
And yet precisely for this reason, Epicurus’s first consolation—as long as they are here, death can’t be—becomes totally inaccessible to them. For even though their selves are still here, in a crucial sense they have already died. One team member, George, reflecting that his life ended with its high-water mark of twenty years earlier, laments: “Everything is in the past tense. I’m in the past tense.”2 His life is now over, even though he himself still has decades to go. And so it seems to George, contrary to Epicurus’s first consolation, as if death has already arrived while he himself is
still here. In fact, ever since his life ended, his existence has in a way been a posthumous one.
The Holderlin strategy—the strategy that makes real Epicurus’s second consolation, by ensuring that once death arrives our life is long over and can’t be harmed by it—thus poses a dilemma. It’s one that the thirtyish actor Jonah Hill once nicely illustrated. Reflecting on his life over a beer with the New Yorker writer Tad Friend, Hill mused: “My twenties were one hundred per cent about work. My excess was moviemaking—I made over thirty films. Now I want to focus on being around, physically present, for the possibility of relationships to happen—marriage, kids.” Sounds like the Holderlin strategy—except Hill then immediately anticipates the downside: “I mean, it’s not over, it was great, it is great, it will still be great. I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. Cheers!”3
In this chapter, I look at the challenges faced by those who follow the Holderlin strategy, those who seek to live a life that ends before (sometimes long before) they themselves do, a life set in amber so that death cannot touch it. They live so as to gain maximum psychological connection to Epicurus’s second consolation: once death comes, we are no longer here to be harmed by it. Their goal is to achieve as early on in life as possible, and then relax for the remainder. But as Jonah Hill realizes, it’s not easy to rest on your laurels, because it involves living in a kind of death zone while you’re still here—contrary to the spirit of Epicurus’s first consolation.
But before looking at the relationship between a happy life and one where the high peak of achievement comes at the beginning, let’s examine the relationship between a happy life and one where the high peak of achievement comes at the end.
Call No Man Happy Until He Is Dead
“Call no man happy until he is dead,” the statesman Solon is said to have warned King Croesus. At the time, the king was knee-deep in “gold and silver and many precious stones,” Tolstoy tells us in his story Croesus and Fate, “as well as numberless soldiers and slaves.”4 Not surprisingly, for most of his forty-eight years Croesus “thought that in all the world there could be no happier man than himself.” But Solon was right. After remaining happy for a very long stretch, Croesus entered a bad endgame. His son lost his life in an accident. His wife committed suicide. And he himself spent his final days in humiliating captivity. If we accept Solon’s dictum, then we can’t call Croesus happy after all. No matter how good your life may have been, if it ended badly, that’s what counts.
Millennia later, the jazz musician Scatman John led a hardscrabble life until well into his fifties, when he released a song that went to number one. “Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop” rocketed the Scatman to fame a few scant years before he died at fifty-seven. Even though he had endured a life of overall hardship, he enjoyed a brilliant if short endgame. So if we accept Solon’s dictum we can call Scatman John happy. True?
The question here pits quantity against finality. Is it better to have had a much greater quantity of happiness than unhappiness over the course of one’s life, even though the ending was unhappy—or to have had a happy ending, even if there was a lot more unhappiness than happiness in one’s life as a whole? If we have to choose, is cumulative happiness more to be coveted than “culminative” happiness? Or is it the other way around?
Neither. The dichotomy between culmination and cumulation is, at least in the most important respect, an illusion.
Think of a football game, the Lions versus the Rams. Scoring more points than the Rams in each of the game’s first three quarters, the Lions go into the final fifteen minutes ahead, 30–5. The Rams then dominate the final quarter, scoring ten unanswered points. Even though things got better for the Rams in the final stretch, and things worse for the Lions, it’s still the Lions who win in the end, 30–15. That’s because once a point has been scored, it becomes part of the cumulation; it never disappears. Even if the Lions had scored all of their thirty points in the first quarter, those points would have stuck around to dominate at the end. The one who scored more points, cumulatively, is also the one who’s on top in the end, culminatively. In this sense there’s no dichotomy between quantity and finality. We would say that the Lions didn’t end the game happy—even if they dominated the first three quarters—only if, in the final quarter, the Rams scored so much more that they then won the game. But in that case the Lions not only would have culminated badly, they would have had the lower cumulation as well. Finality still matches quantity; there’s no dichotomy.
When someone—take Scatman John—ends a life of obscurity with a short period of spectacular recognition, he will often say that it made up for all the years of hardship. What he is saying is that not only did his life have a happy ending, but it did so because the final period was so happy that, in quantitative terms, it outweighed all the previous unhappiness. Culminatively his life ended happy because, cumulatively, total happiness surpassed total unhappiness. As he was dying, Scatman John declared, “Whatever God wants is fine by me . . . I’ve had the very best life.”5
But matters were different for the writer Michael Morpurgo. For the first time, at age sixty-four, Morpurgo had a theatrical success with the play War Horse, based on a little-noticed novel he’d written years earlier. That vindication was not, however, enough for him to pronounce his life happy. “It has changed my life enormously,” Morpurgo declared, “but at the wrong end. I’m nearly 70. I’m flattered, but I’m also slightly vexed that it’s the same book that’s been out there for 30 years.” Morpurgo’s late life was better—in fact, “enormously” better—than what had gone on up till that point. But not, cumulatively, by enough so that he was prepared to say, culminatively, that it was likely to end on a happy note: he felt he was still in the red, not fully redeemed.6 If the cumulation of happiness is insufficient, then the culmination won’t be happy either, even if things get considerably happier at the end.7
“No man ever served the Crown in so many and such important posts as the subject of this biography,” the Saturday Review of March 4, 1905, declared in discussing a new book about the illustrious Marquis of Dufferin and Ava.8 The Marquis was by turns Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Under-Secretary of State for War, Governor General of Canada, and, ultimately, Viceroy of all of India. He held a KP, a GCB, a GCSI, a GCMG, a GCIE, and a PC. And yet in the final analysis the reviewer, too, felt compelled to invoke Solon: “Call no man happy until he is dead.” Why so? Perhaps it’s because, as the review’s last line tells us, the Marquis, “like many another, died babbling of the playing fields of Eton.”
Not a great ending, true—babbling of Eton after having been a baron of the empire. But then as Thomas Nagel points out, in that sense a “bad end is in store for us all.”9 And yet many of us—despite the difficult and debilitated ending that awaits—would say nonetheless that we should be called happy when we die, as long as we are happy about our life as a whole. Surely, then, Dufferin and Ava’s prodigious accomplishments outweighed, in a cumulative sense, a little babbling at the end. And so wouldn’t he, in a culminative sense, have led a happy life? Why the reference to Solon?
Not because of the final month or so of babbling. Rather, following his long string of triumphs, the Marquis was involved in a sensational financial scandal that left the mining firm he had chaired bankrupt and blotted out all the wonderful things he had done. He didn’t die happy, but not because he was blubbering at the very end. He didn’t die happy because in his life, taken as a whole, the sharpness of the grief outweighed the smugness of the gratification. The ending was determined by what happened in toto, not simply by what happened at the end itself.
So when Solon says, “Call no man happy until he is dead,” what is the best way to understand him? Is it that you have to wait until the final period to determine whether the overall happiness in your life outweighs the unhappiness? Or is it that you have to wait till the final period to determine whether the final period is unhappy—on the grounds that if it is, your life will end unhappily no matter h
ow much good preceded it? The former makes more sense: and so any dichotomy between cumulative happiness over the duration of one’s life and culminative happiness late in life is a false one.
Has-beens
So let’s turn now to another dichotomy, a real one: continuing to stay in the arena to cumulate successes over the duration of one’s life versus going for colossal success early in life and then relaxing. Going for early successes is what the Holderlin strategy recommends. That way, you maximize your psychological access to Epicurus’s second consolation: once death comes, there will be nothing left of your life for it to harm or despoil.
Say you played on a storied basketball team near the beginning of your life, as did the men of Jason Miller’s play. You won the state high-school championship with a turnaround jump shot in the last five seconds, the stuff of barroom and billiard-hall legend ever since. Or, to take another example, early on you won the title of Miss America. Should you listen to Holderlin, and decide that “more isn’t necessary”? There’s an advantage and a disadvantage to the “Holderlin strategy,” the strategy of getting life’s accomplishments done early, replacing—as soon as possible—a continuously gnawing anxiety about whether you’ll ever make it with the secure knowledge that in fact you did.
The advantage: once you’ve won a basketball championship, or a Miss America title, no one can take that victory away from you. It’s emblazoned in the history books. It’s on the record. You can relax for the remainder of your years—at least about your life. As Third Eye Blind rocker Stephen Jenkins puts it, “The Clash, The Police, Led Zeppelin—they all had their moment [on top of the charts], but it’s locked in time.”10 Death comes too late to take it away.