The Consolations of Mortality

by Andrew Stark

  “Would you rather die in the middle of a book and have some bastard finish it for you,” Julian Barnes asks, “or leave behind a work in progress that not a single bastard in the whole world was remotely interested in finishing?”5 The bucket lister says, “Neither. If I die tomorrow I won’t have started it, and if I die in twenty years, I’ll have finished it.” Either way, it won’t be nipped in the bud or left for others to mangle or ruin. The possibility that the bucket lister could die tomorrow means that there’s no point in getting started today. The possibility that he might die in twenty years means that there’s no need to get started today. With each new sunrise, the two questions elicit the same answers. Like pincers, they squeeze out any intermediating alternative. For what if he dies in between tomorrow and twenty years from now, say in two or five or seven years? Well either that’s not enough time to finish it, so there’d be no point in getting started now. Or it’s more than enough time to finish it, so there’s no need to get started now.

  The bucket listers, then, are living the existentialist consolation, in practice. They are doing exactly what any person would do if he had made death’s ever-present possibility a continuing thread in his life, living as if the end might come either tomorrow or in twenty years.

  But does such a life amalgamate the singular with the vivid, as the existentialist consolation would also have it?

  No. It separates them. What’s vivid is generic; what’s singular seems to have no pulse. Instead, if you want to lead a life that does fuse the singular and the vivid, then you’d do better to think of death in precisely the way that Paul Tillich counsels us against: as a scissors at the end of your life, not a constant thread within it. Like Ivan Ilych, you would then perpetually plunge into new projects: projects that do not remain at the vague, sketched-out stage—after all, the thought that you might die this afternoon is wholly foreign to you—but that as a result might well be in midair when death does cut with its scissors. Or, like a Holderlin strategist, you might rush to get all your projects over with as quickly as possible—after all, you’re not about to take the chance that you’ve got years and years ahead of you—so that the scissors won’t snip them. At least Ivan’s and Holderlin’s projects, when they are happening, blend singular action with vivid experiences.

  The downside of the Ivan and Holderlin strategies? Your life might not end precisely when you do. It risks either continuing on to be completed by others, eventually sapped of its singularity (Ivan) or finishing long before, drained of its vividness (Holderlin). The upside? You stand a chance that at least some of what you do will be both singular and vivid. You will have lived a life that, in its prime moments, was uniquely and vibrantly yours.

  You want a real self, a self that’s led a maximally singular and vivid life? Maybe the existentialist consolation is not for you.

  “It’s a Wonderful Life” versus “Life Is Beautiful”

  One of Citizen Kane’s best scenes occurs early in the film. Bernstein, the financial codger played by Everett Sloane, muses about his dealings with Charles Foster Kane while puttering around his desk, consulting his office ticker-tape and doing the other kinds of business that got the movie hailed for its deeply naturalistic performances. At one point, Bernstein interrupts his reminiscences about Kane with a deeper reverie about a young woman he had glimpsed, one day many years before, on a ferry. “I only saw her for a second,” Bernstein says with a faraway look in his eyes, “but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”

  We can be certain that the girl has no idea of the singular mark she left on Bernstein’s life. And what is true of her is true of us all. Every day, we each change the lives of friends, family, and strangers—provoking thoughts, entering lines of sight, figuring as the topic of conversations—in countless ways that we don’t know about. We take the last carton of milk at the 7–11, unaware that we thereby cause the young man behind us to drive four miles to Kroger’s. There he runs into his long-lost girlfriend; they marry and have a child who grows up to be a game-changing secretary of state. Sum up such incidents, large and small, over the course of anyone’s life. It’s hard not to conclude that the vast bulk of the singular footprint our actions leave upon the world—the way it is different for our being here—will never come into our own consciousness, never form part of our own experience.

  Conversely, the vast bulk of what does appear vivid in our awareness, our experience, involves things that we ourselves do not act to bring about. Many are common or shared events, things that would happen anyway even if we were no longer present to be conscious of them. Think of the winning lottery numbers we’ll check this evening. Or the elevator Muzak we’ll hear tomorrow. Or the World Series we plan to watch next year. We ourselves are the recipients, the end point, of such experiences, of the impressions the world makes on us; and so we feel them vividly. But nothing we have done—no action of ours—was necessary to originate them, to bring them about.

  So any given person’s life throws off two large penumbras. First, there are all of the ways she singularly acts upon and uniquely shapes the world but that she will never experience herself. And second, there are all of the things that she, in common with others, experiences about the world, but that she herself has no role in bringing about; in no way do they reflect her own actions.

  We try to delude ourselves, to bring the penumbras into alignment. Think of the Frank Capra film It’s a Wonderful Life. Jimmy Stewart’s character, George Bailey, learns, with the help of an angel, what a hell-on-earth life would have been for so many had he never existed. Or think of Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful. Benigni’s character, Guido Orefice, transforms a hell on earth that he had no part in making—life with his son in a Nazi concentration camp—into a beautiful drama for the boy, pretending that it’s a gigantic game that Guido himself has orchestrated to introduce adventure into his child’s life.

  George Bailey wants to bring the imprint he has stamped on others more fully into his own consciousness; he needs to be able to see the world he has made. Guido wants to view the world that’s pressing in on his consciousness as one that somehow reflects his imprint; he needs to feel that he has made the world that he sees. In the most wonderful kind of life, then, the consequences of our own actions would play a far more prominent role in our daily experience. And in the most beautiful kind of life, our everyday experiences would be far more traceable to the consequences of our own actions.

  Yet before the angel visits him, George must live with the fact that the consequences of most actions he takes almost immediately begin to dissipate into the grander scheme of things, impossible for him to discern. Is it so surprising, then, that he begins to wonder what he himself will lose on the day when he can no longer take any actions at all? Given that whatever singular marks he carves on the world remain so vague and murky to him, it seems to George as if no difference would be made if he were no longer there. That’s why he thinks of killing himself.

  By the same token, Guido knows that almost all of what he is able to experience—what’s vividly real to him—would occur whether he were there or not. Is it so surprising, then, that he begins to wonder how many, exactly, of the unfolding events of his life will be lost on the day when he himself is no longer present to experience them? The one event that might not have happened, had Guido not been on the planet, is his own death. On the day the camp is liberated, he marches comically in front of a Nazi soldier so as to keep up the charade for his son, and is then killed. Otherwise, everything in the rest of the film goes on as it would have even if he had remained alive. And that includes the illusion of the game: the following day, Guido’s son gets rescued by an American tank. And Guido had promised the boy that a tank would be his reward for completing the “game” successfully.

  According to the existentialist consolation, a full awareness of death is what forces us to create a vivid and singular self, one that’s bold and sharply etched. But as George and Guido sugges
t, a full awareness of how pale and indistinct our self actually is against the background of the world—of how little of our own actions we vividly experience and how much of our own experience has nothing to do with our singular actions—can make us feel how little would be lost when we die. What’s singular to George fails to be vivid to him; what’s vivid to Guido has nothing of his singular stamp on it. Even the president of the United States experiences only a fraction of the difference that his actions have made in other people’s lives, while the vast bulk of what he does experience results from actions other than his own. Perhaps that accounts for the peevishness that critics like Maureen Dowd saw in Barack Obama during his term of office.6

  George and Guido feel their own invisibility—the paleness and indistinctness of their own selves—in an extreme way. And it’s precisely that feeling of invisibility that makes them willing to die, because they can’t see what would be lost. But that poses a serious question for the existentialist consolation. Suppose that an awareness of death does cause us to go forth into the world and carve out an authentic and vibrant self. Suppose we do hammer out a self whose singular actions bring it deeply vivid experiences, and whose vivid experiences result from its own singular acts. Why should that make us more reconciled to death? Shouldn’t we be less reconciled? After all, we will be keenly aware of what will be lost when we die.

  “Somewhere Towards the End”

  Focus on the fact, the existentialist consolation counsels, that no one else can die your particular death. It is your own specific string of experiences and actions that your death will put to an end, nobody else’s. And so you alone bear the burden of “care,” to use Heidegger’s phrase, for your own life. You bear the responsibility for using each minute in whatever way means the most to you. Recognize all of this, and then you will be primed to carve out your own authentic and vivid path.

  But now suppose that you actually are near the end. Suppose that you know not just that you will die but also, with a shocking precision, pretty much when. Suppose that “the first days of the rest of your life” have, at long last, simultaneously become the last days of your life. You’ve received the doctor’s diagnosis.

  Impending death has little to recommend it. And yet two silver linings do frequently get mentioned in the reflections of those in life’s endgame. They point, though, in just the opposite direction from the existentialist consolation.

  “Death,” Claudian said, “renders all equal.” As we approach the terminus of our life, everyone has the short end of the stick. No matter how good our high-school rival once had it, toward the finale his life will come to resemble ours too. As William Ian Miller observes, “death is democratizing.” And so is the approach to it, when people of average looks enjoy a quiet smile “at seeing that the nice-looking people who treated them with contempt are now not differentiable from themselves in the eyes of the young.”7

  To fully view death as the common fate of mankind—instead of an intensely individual experience that we each face alone, as the existentialists counsel—is one of the few psychic releases (even if it doesn’t rise to the level of a full-fledged consolation) available to the dying. Life may present us with many common or mass experiences along the way, from Loy Krathrong to a Lil Wayne concert. Dying, though, is the king of universal human experiences. We’re all in this together.

  And yet the existentialist consolation insists that we not so see it. The fear is that we would then fall prey to Ivan Ilych’s abstract view of mortality, by which death is something that happens to mankind in general: a perspective that obscures what it really means for oneself in particular, eroding our impetus to use our time wisely and carve out an authentic life. It is, though, one of the few privileges reserved to those who actually are dying to see themselves as living in a land of true universal equality. And one can do that only by grasping that death is a general human condition, not, as the existentialist consolation counsels, an entirely individuated human fate.8

  And here is impending death’s second gift. At the end of life, it becomes not “care”—the ever-present pressure to use each minute in the most meaningful way—but carefreeness that more potently promotes authenticity. We can finally tell our neighbor what we really think of her because we won’t be around to experience any serious blowback. We can wear our trousers rolled because it doesn’t matter anymore what people say. Having arrived at this late stage, the full consequences of our actions will escape our experience not only because they usually do in life anyway, but simply because we will die before they fully blossom. A newspaper article on hospices in Roanoke reports that “patients given only ‘a year’ of life suddenly were freed to live. Masks and defenses fell away. They noticed colors and clouds, felt sorrow and joy.”9 It is one of the few privileges of the dying to live in a land of carefree freedom.10

  Some of us more than others, depending on fate and our dispositions, will enjoy access to this death-shadowed republic of universal equality and carefree freedom. But none of us will gain entry as long as we abide by the existentialist consolation: as long as we fix on the idea that we each die our own distinct death, and that we must relentlessly maintain the ever-vigilant burden of care that comes with that mindset. Clinging white-knuckled to the existentialist consolation throughout our lives to the very end, we will miss a kind of sweetness, a kind of all-in-the-same-boat equality and carefree liberty, that the final approach to death—in fact, only the final approach to death—can bring.

  Memento Mori

  We should applaud our mortality, the existentialist consolation tells us. Without death we would feel no sense of urgency: nothing forcing us to use each moment wisely, no compulsion to craft a life. And not just any life, but a full and authentic one. Given true awareness of our limited time, why would we squander even one moment on anything we don’t really care about? Our finitude—as long as we keep it front and center in our minds—compels us to choose the life path that matters most to us.

  But something crucial would seem to follow from this. Once we have come to the end of that path, we would then, ideally, die. Our self, Nietzsche says, should expire at the point where the life it led also comes to an end. “Many die too late and some die too early,” Nietzsche’s Zarathustra spake; “Die at the right time.”11

  Yet short of suicide, how can we arrange for self and life to terminate at the same time?

  There would seem to be two possibilities. One of them we’ve already seen. Knowing that we will eventually die but having no clue as to when, we would live as if death might come at any moment. We would, as Kierkegaard suggests, live each day as if it could be our last (because it could be), but also as if it were the first day in the rest of a long life (because it could be that too). This is what the bucket listers do. On each day they continue to cram in as much as they can by way of new experiences before they die, unlike Holderlin strategists, who have brought their life to a conclusion long before their self exits. But bucket listers also never start an action plan that might be seriously interrupted by death, unlike Ivan Ilych, whose life’s loose ends thrash about long after he himself has departed, now in the hands of petulant relatives and vain colleagues who will handle them in ways he would deplore. In this way, given that their self’s departure could come at any time, bucket listers try to ensure that whenever that should happen, their life will end too, instead of either before it or after.

  But there’s another strategy available for dying neither too early nor too late. Instead of an awareness that our death will certainly happen but without a clue as to when, we could adopt the reverse perspective. We could operate as if we know when our deaths are likely to take place, while remaining uncertain as to whether we in fact ever will die. And, in effect, this is what most of us do. Most of us have in mind a rough life plan based on a normal human span of seventy to eighty years. Yet until almost the very end, we conduct ourselves, as Freud observes, as if we’re not at all sure whether our existence actually will terminate. “No one be
lieves in his own death,” Freud says, or “to put the same thing in another way, in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.”12 A full confrontational awareness of death’s certainty, of what it really means to die, would be paralyzing, Freud believes, not galvanizing.

  Yet this strategy—operating with a sense of when we will die while remaining uncertain as to whether we actually will—does have one eminently reasonable feature. It’s completely consistent with the way we view most other events that lie in the future. We have a sense of when they will happen while at some level remaining uncertain (the future being open and unforeseeable) as to whether they actually will. Our mental picture of the future appears to us as a kind of blueprint. It roughs out the time when certain things are expected to occur—our dentist appointment next week, our summer vacation, our graduation from university, our becoming a parent—assuming of course that they do occur. And we repress the thought (it just becomes part of the background) that for any number of reasons those things quite possibly never will happen. We have little choice but to conduct our lives on the assumption that we know when a particular future event is going to happen, while keeping under wraps the lingering uncertainty as to whether—because no one knows the future, so who can say?—it actually will. So why shouldn’t we treat death the same way?

  Because, the existentialist consolation says, our death is the only future event that flips around this otherwise appropriate approach to what lies ahead. We know for sure that our death will happen, even though most of us, for most of our lives, have no idea of when.

  In insisting that we view our earthly departure in this way, though, the existentialist consolation actually treats death more like a past than a future event. After all, our memories are full of episodes that did in fact occur, even though we can’t say exactly when most of them actually happened—the date, or even the year or how old we were.13 Similarly, as existentialists rightly say, we know that our death will in fact occur, even though we cannot say when: the date or the year or how old we’ll be when it happens. Maybe the phrase memento mori—“remember that you will die,” which the existentialist consolation places front and center of our consciousness—is a particularly apt usage. Death, alone among all the events that lie ahead of us, resembles our remembrances of what lies behind. As with them we have greater certainty about the event’s actual occurrence than about the timing—even if, with all other future events, we have greater certainty about the event’s timing than we do about whether it actually will occur.14