The Consolations of Mortality

by Andrew Stark

  Perhaps the answer is this: Suppose that we analogize the past 2,500 years of human history to a race course, and humanity itself to an athlete running it. Then certainly humanity—the athlete—is much older now than it was when it was traversing the early parts of the course, such as the time of Socrates and Aristotle. In those days, the Golden Age of Greece, humanity was much younger.

  But now suppose that we think of that early part of the race course itself—the time of Socrates and Aristotle, with all its literary and cultural riches—as having got up as humanity ran through it. Dusting itself off, that golden-age-of-Greece era began jogging right alongside humanity, accompanying it into the future instead of disappearing into the past behind it. By now, 2,500 years later, that time will seem ancient. Hence we call it “antiquity,” even though humanity itself was much younger when it happened.

  At some level, then, it does make sense to say that a past period of time, whether the Golden Age of Athens or, perhaps, our own championship season, can itself endure, can continue to exist—in our minds, of course—as time passes. It can continue to live, and hence grow older, indeed ancient, just as we do. It needn’t immediately recede into the past, dead and gone. But when does it make sense to look at moments in time this way—as living and growing old with us instead of dead and gone? What kind of thinking is involved?

  An object in space—the Parthenon, say, or the high-school basketball court—doesn’t disappear once it’s completed. Rather, with each passing year and for as long as it exists, it grows older; it has been with us all the longer. If a given moment in time can somehow be analogized to an object in space, then it too—the Golden Age of Athens, say, or our own championship season—needn’t disappear once it’s completed either. Instead, that moment itself can stay with us all the way along, growing older with each passing year. Coach, in Jason Miller’s Championship Season, seems to have made precisely this kind of equation between a moment and an object. He treats the state championship game twenty years earlier not as an event that has long since receded into the past, but—like the trophy that still sits on his shelf—as an object that has accompanied him, very much present and growing old with him, over the years.20

  Often, though, we mean something very different when we describe events, as opposed to objects, as old. Think, for example, of an event like Damon Runyon’s “oldest permanent floating crap game in New York.” This kind of event grows old by continuing on indefinitely in time, by never coming to a completion. It doesn’t come to an end as did the Golden Age of Greece or the championship game and then—instead of receding back in time—somehow begin growing older along with us the way an object does.

  Other kinds of events, while they do come to an end, then become old precisely because they slip back in time, not because they continue living and aging along with us. Think, for example, of the “old” world record in the 100 meters: the record race (9.79 seconds) that Maurice Greene ran in 1999. This usage of “old” does not imply that the record is still with us, that it’s gotten older year by year, and that we call it old because of its age as we do an antique object. Instead “old” here implies just the opposite—that something “new” has ended it, that the “old” record has receded in time and is no longer with us. A new record (Usain Bolt, 9.58 seconds) has supplanted the old and left it in the past. It became old precisely because the new terminated it.

  So what we’re looking for are events that are “old” not because they’ve never come to a completion like Damon Runyon’s “oldest” permanent floating crap game, or because they’ve slipped back in time like Maurice Greene’s “old” running record. On the contrary: we’re looking for events that we would call “old” because they have come to a completion and yet stay with us over time—like an object. Like a trophy or a stadium. It’s those kinds of events that make possible a Holderlin-style life—one that’s over and done but that’s still sufficiently present to us that we feel no itch to keep doing more, thereby giving death something to frustrate. But what kinds of events qualify?

  Alas. Let’s look a little more closely at the kinds of events that we deem to have grown “old” because, after coming to an end, they then aged along with us, like objects. Most in fact are more like units of time than events proper: the good old days, olden times, the age of antiquity. While they did come to an end they were never—as events always can be—terminated. Units of time can’t be terminated. They’re already terms, the basic terms, of time. Tuesday wasn’t terminated by Wednesday, nor was 2013 terminated by 2014—nor was the presidential term of George Bush terminated by the presidential term of Barack Obama—in the way that, say, an old running record gets terminated by a new one. So when we identify a past moment as an “age,” or as “times” or “days,” we are no longer treating it as an event but rather elevating it out of that realm altogether and conceiving of it as a kind of unit, a basic building block, of time: something that comes to an end but without something else—as can always happen with an ordinary event—putting an end to it. Depending on its meaning to us—whether cultural as with the age of antiquity or sentimental as with “old times”—it can then grow old along with us like a cherished object.21

  But a specific event like “that championship season”? The men of That Championship Season—this is their tragedy—can’t seem to see their golden moment the way Coach does. They can’t seem to see it as an event that, having ended, then ages along with them like an object, a trophy: something that they can pick up and cradle twenty years later every bit as much as on the day it was won. For some of the men that championship game did end, but then—having been terminated by the final buzzer—it immediately began moving further and further back in time like an old running record. You “can’t sit around fingering the past” as if the past were an object, one teammate says.22 For others, it’s as if that championship season is still going on; they’re still delusively living it. It’s gotten older simply by never having ended, just like the oldest permanent floating crap game in New York. None of the men can seem to see that championship season as over, ended, and yet companionably growing older with them.

  Except, of course, for Coach. He alone seems to be able to keep that moment, that event, set in amber and yet still evergreen. He follows Seneca’s advice: he treats it as an object, an “everlasting and unanxious possession.”

  But in fact his tale is the most cautionary.

  Social psychologists tell us that the events, or experiences, in our lives—trips, concerts, a great meal—actually make us happier than the objects: cars, necklaces, a snazzy coat. True, experiences vanish in time as soon as they happen. But we often get a warm glow whenever we think of the people with whom we shared them. Objects, by contrast, might last over time. But they tend to be sources of invidious status. We value them, often, precisely because we don’t share them with others; we prize them because they distinguish us—they separate us—from our peers. Also, events or experiences, such as the vacation at Yosemite we took last year, tend to be unique. They’re less easily compared with alternative events, such as the holiday in Yellowstone we didn’t take instead. After all, that trip to Yellowstone never came into existence to begin with, and so no real pound-for-pound comparison is possible. But we can always compare the object we chose—the toaster we bought—to the one we didn’t, and feel regret.23 Because they are both less communal and more comparative, objects generally fail to make us as happy as experiences do.

  But the distinction between objects and experiences is not a clean one. Psychologists note that many objects—a flat-screen television, for example—can also be the source of great experiences or events shared with others.24 And, as with Coach, the arrow would also seem to go the other way. Sometimes great experiences, great events in our lives, become like treasured objects to us. They tend to be precisely those events or experiences, such as championship seasons, that most resemble objects. They are invidious triumphs over competitors. And they do have comparators, such as the
scores achieved by others.

  Unfortunately, as eventually happens with most of the objects in our life, we inevitably grow tired of and disappointed in such events—and in a way we don’t when we treat them as the experiences they are and simply allow them to slip back in time once they’ve happened. Coach encounters precisely this kind of fatigue and disillusionment at the end of the play. The event that he has treated as an object to cherish and coddle—that championship game—finally, after the coup de grâce of a disillusioning evening with his now-middle-aged team, becomes, like any object eventually will, cold and dull. In fact it crumbles. It utterly loses its capacity, as psychologists tell us many an object ultimately will, to make him happy. Far better that he had treated it as an event, an experience, and—allowing it to begin sliding back in time the moment it was done—then struck out for new ones. He might have felt wistful about it. But he wouldn’t have mourned it, as he does when that championship season finally dies to him.

  Events are not supposed to persist in time the way objects like trophies do. Instead, once over, they are meant to disappear backward in time beyond our grasp. Not only is that how most of us unavoidably do look at the moments of our lives, it’s how (and here Coach is a cautionary tale) we ought to look at them. But in that case, Epicurus’s second consolation—that once death comes there will be nothing of ourselves that it can harm—will finally have little psychological resonance with us. We can try to get our life over and done with so that death can’t harm it, as the Holderlin strategy recommends. But then we must watch it recede ever further into the past. And so we risk becoming the chief mourners of our own life.25

  three

  LOOK WHO’S CALLING HIMSELF NOTHING

  An old joke: A rabbi enters the synagogue sanctuary and, looking around to make sure no one else is present, gets down on his knees, beats his breast, and cries “O Lord, what am I compared to thee? I am nothing. Nothing!” He rises and is about to leave by a side door when in comes the cantor, who, not seeing the rabbi, also falls to his knees, gazes heavenward, and moans, “Lord, compared to thy greatness I am nothing! Nothing, do you hear me? Nothing!” Getting up and brushing himself off, the cantor moves to the side door where he sees the rabbi; the two exchange pleasantries and are about to leave when in comes the beadle—the synagogue caretaker. Furtively glancing around and, not seeing the rabbi and the cantor, he too kneels, throws back his head, and wails, “In thine eyes my Lord, what am I? I am nothing! Nothing, I tell you! Nothing!” At which point the cantor turns to the rabbi, elbows him playfully in the ribs, and scoffs, “Look who’s calling himself ‘nothing.’”

  I think of this joke when I reflect on the Buddhist consolation for death. To spend our life tenaciously pursuing a set of self-focused projects and attachments, Buddhist wisdom argues, is to court suffering whenever they end in disappointment. And they inevitably will. Far better to abandon any concern with our self. Indeed, far better to recognize, with the help of various Buddhist insights, that there is no such thing as the self to begin with. It’s a mere mental construct, a figment of our mind. It is, in fact, nothing. We need not suffer from worldly pain and loss because we—our selves—do not exist. There is no subject that undergoes any such pain and loss, no subject to whom that suffering belongs. The trick is simply to see this.1

  There’s an added bonus: Since our self is the very thing that we are supposed to lose when we die, death—once we understand that the self doesn’t exist to begin with—will then become a nonevent for us, not worth fretting over. This is the Buddhist consolation. Its central idea of self-abandonment—not Buddhism as a whole in all its richness—is my topic here.

  It’s not true, as some critics of Buddhism argue, that by abandoning our sense of self we cease to have any reason to live. Even if our self—along with our ego, our selfishness, our anxieties for our own success—disappear, our life—its sensuality, its compassion for others, the joy we feel when we use it to repair the world—continues. “Have I ever hated life?” Thomas Buddenbrook asks—“pure, relentless life? Folly and misconception! I have but hated myself, because I could not bear it. But I love [life].”2

  There’s a contrast to be made between the Buddhist consolation and Epicurus’s first consolation, at least as ways of life. By barring all thoughts of death from our minds as we do when we follow Epicurus’s first consolation—as long as we are here, death cannot be and so remains irrelevant—we risk failing to wrap our life up. As a result, while our self ends at death, much of our life, with its uncompleted projects and unresolved relationships, continues on without it. On the Buddhist consolation, however, our self ends long before we die. It ends at the moment we realize it doesn’t exist, while our life, with its sensuousness and richness, continues on without it.

  Buddhism, of course, is a religion. Many of its tenets rely on spiritual or mythological claims that go beyond this world and so, too, beyond the premises of my discussion here. I will, consequently, look at the Buddhist consolation ultimately through the lenses of Western philosophers such as Oxford’s Derek Parfit and Princeton’s Mark Johnston, who have adapted its teachings for a nonbelieving audience, and who, personally, find them consoling. I focus, then, on the simple core of the Buddhist consolation—no self, no death—and I look at it in a freestanding way, detached from its central role as part of the Buddhist progression from samsara to nirvana.

  The “self is nothing,” one Buddhist scholar writes.3 The “self is nothing but an illusion,” the self is nothing more than a “conditional semiotic construct,” “there is no self per se at all,” say others.4 The “self does not exist”; “the self is nothing.”5 I am uneasy about this. I imagine Death, relaxing in an armchair, thumbing through recent writings on Buddhist views of the self. Shaking his head, Death chuckles quietly: “Heh, heh, heh . . . look who’s being called nothing.”

  But perhaps this is unfair to the Buddhist consolation. The other “death is benign” consolations, too, try to defang nothingness. Either they deny the horror of the nothingness that awaits after death or they celebrate the beauty of the various nothingnesses to be found during life. Each does so in its own way.

  In Epicurus’s first consolation—as long as we are here, death can’t be—“nothingness” comes off as utterly harmless. By definition, death’s “nothingness” can’t ever be experienced. There’s no such thing as a subject of nothingness. After all, if there is anything—anything at all, even a bare subject—then there isn’t nothing. Nothingness, then, is self-neutralizing and so completely benign.

  In Epicurus’s second consolation—once death comes, we are no longer here to be harmed by it—“nothingness” is actually a consummation devoutly to be wish’d. The best thing we can do is try to get all our accomplishments, the Sturm und Drang of life, behind us as soon as possible. We would then abide for the remainder of our days in utter calm and imperturbability. After all, we’d have nothing to lose to death, simply because there would be nothing anymore to our lives. And once we understood that this attractive state of nothingness in life doesn’t really differ all that much from the nothingness of death, we’d easily glide from one nothingness into the other.

  Finally in existentialism, nothingness—just like death—is necessary for the very existence of our self. “Nothing,” of course, is the opposite of “everything.” And so Sartre applies the term “nothingness” to our human capacity to negate reality, to transcend everything that actually exists and think about what doesn’t. Without the possibility of nothingness, we couldn’t follow our own authentic choices. Instead they’d be dictated by the existing reality around us.6

  Each consolation, in its own way, thus slyly domesticates nothingness, making it serve the purposes of its own key idea.

  According to the Buddhist consolation, the self—the ostensible victim of death’s nothingness—doesn’t exist. It’s nothing itself: a mental illusion.

  According to Epicurus’s first consolation, a subject—an ostensible victim—of de
ath’s nothingness can’t exist. It’s nothing itself: a metaphysical impossibility.

  According to Epicurus’s second consolation, nothingness is a good thing. It’s synonymous with imperturbability and calm.

  According to the existentialist consolation, nothingness is a good thing. It’s synonymous with imagination and creativity.

  The four consolations, without ever intending it—they certainly weren’t consulting each other on the matter—have each tried to take nothingness back from death. Buddhism is not alone in this regard. Put another way: death might find something to chuckle about in each of the four consolations.7

  Breath and Shadow

  Since I—and possibly you—will never know what the Buddhist experience of self-less-ness (or no-self) is like, it’s worth considering the metaphors that Buddhist saints and scholars use to convey it to the noninitiate. Those metaphors originate in the need to depict life in the absence of all of the motives, cognitive structures, and passions that make up the self. No motives or cognitive categories or passions, in other words, no self. No self, no selfish desire. No selfish desire, no suffering—because suffering comes from the frustration of desire. And of course no self, no death. So here, I look at what it means to abandon the self, to abandon all our motives, cognitive categories, and passions, while still remaining alive.