The Death of Ivan Ilyich is, in the best tradition of the Christian memento mori, a study in how the idea of death may reorient our priorities away from the worldly and towards the spiritual, away from whist and dinner parties and towards truth and love.
Tolstoy’s keen understanding of this phenomenon had its origins in personal experience: only a few years before writing Ivan Ilyich, he had questioned his own deepest concerns in the context of a newfound awareness of his mortality. In A Confession (1882), a record of that self-interrogation, he explained how at the age of fifty-one, with the publication of War and Peace and Anna Karenina behind him, world-famous and rich, he came to realise that he had long been living his life not by his own values, or even by God’s, but by those of “society,” which had inspired in him a restless desire to be stronger than others, more renowned, more important and richer. In his social circle, he noted, “ambition, love of power, covetousness, lasciviousness, pride, anger and revenge were all respected.” But now, confronting the notion of death, he doubted the validity of his previous goals: “ ‘Well, you will have six thousand desyatinas of land in Samara Government and three hundred horses, and what then? … Very well; you will be more famous than Gogol or Pushkin or Shakespeare or Molière, or than all the writers in the world—and what of it?’ I could find no reply at all.”
The one answer that eventually silenced his questions was God: he resolved to spend the remainder of his days observing the teachings of Jesus Christ. Whatever we may make of the particularly Christian solution that Tolstoy adopted to his crisis of meaning, his sceptical journey follows a familiar trajectory. It is an example of how the thought of death may serve as a guide to a more genuine and more significant way of life. It is a solemn call, to follow Bach’s Cantata BWV 106 (Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit), to determine our true priorities:
Set thy house in order,
This is the ancient law:
For thou shalt die,
Man, thou must die.
And not remain alive.
Yea, come, Lord Jesus, come.
Bestelle dein Haus,
Es ist der alte Bund:
Denn du wirst Sterben,
Mensch, du musst sterben.
Und nicht lebendig bleiben.
Ja, komm, Herr Jesus, Komm.
3.
But how, specifically, might mortal illness help to orient us away
from an excessive concern with status?
Principally, it may do so by relieving us of our capacity for many of the activities for which society honours its members, including throwing dinner parties, working effectively and dispensing patronage. Death thereby reveals the fragility, and so perhaps the worthless-ness, of the attentions we stand to gain through status. In good health and at the height of our powers, we are spared any need to wonder whether those who pay us compliments are doing so out of sincere affection or in some evanescent quest for advantage. We seldom have the courage or the cynicism to ask, Is it me they’re fond of, or my position in society? Illness, by felling the conditions of worldly love, renders the distinction quickly and all too cruelly evident. With death looming, clad in our hospital pyjamas, we are liable to turn in rage against our status-conditional lovers, as angry with ourselves for being vain enough to be seduced by them as we are with them for orchestrating their heartless seductions in the first place. The idea of death brings an authenticity to social life: there may be no better way to clear our calendar of engagements than to speculate as to who among our acquaintances would make the trip to our hospital bed.
As conditional love begins to lose its interest for us, so, too, may a number of the things we pursue in order to secure that love. If wealth, esteem and power buy us a kind of regard that will last only so long as our status holds, but conversely we are destined to end our lives defenceless and dishevelled, longing to be comforted like small children, then we have an unusually clear reason to concentrate our energies on those relationships which will best survive the erosion of our standing.
4.
Herodotus reported that it was the custom, towards the end of Egyptian feasts, when the revellers were at their most exuberant, for servants to march through the banqueting hall and among the tables carrying skeletons on stretchers. Regrettably, he did not go on to explain what effect this reminder of death was intended to have on the guests: would it make them keener to carry on with their merrymaking, or send them home in a newfound mood of sobriety?
Typically, the thought of death may be expected, first, to usher us towards whatever happens to matter most to us (be it drinking beside the banks of the Nile, writing a book or making a fortune), and second, to encourage us to pay less attention to the verdicts of others—who will not, after all, be doing the dying for us. The prospect of our own extinction may draw us towards that way of life on which our hearts place the greatest value.
This theme animates “To His Coy Mistress” (1681), Andrew Marvell’s famous poetic attempt to lure a hesitant young woman into bed, through lines that stress not only her beauty and his fidelity but also the less obviously romantic notion that both she and he will soon enough be stone dead. Addressing a subject who is apparently reluctant to express her desire due to anxiety over her reputation, Marvell uses the spectre of death to shift her attention away from her status within the community and towards her own wishes. He would not object to her coyness, he assures her, were it not for the fact that
… at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity… .
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Shakespeare, too, seemed eager to exploit death’s amorous possibilities. One of his sonnets urges his beloved to anticipate the moment when
forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field
even as another sonnet looks towards time’s transformation of
your day of youth to sullied night
While the thought of death may occasionally be abused (to alarm individuals or groups into doing things they might never do otherwise), more often, and more hopefully, it may help us to correct our tendency to live as if we could afford to defer forever, for the sake of propriety, our underlying commitments to ourselves. Contemplating our mortality may give us the courage to unhook our lives from the more gratuitous of society’s expectations. In the presence of a skeleton, the repressive aspects of others’ opinions have a habit of shedding their power to intimidate.
5.
Whatever other differences there may be between them, Christian and secular concepts overlap substantially on the subject of what is meaningful in life when viewed from the perspective of death. There is a strikingly similar positive emphasis on love, authentic social relations and charity, and a common condemnation of the pursuit of power, military strength, wealth and glory. These and certain other ends and activities seem almost universally inconsequential beside the thought of death.
Elsewhere in his Histories, Herodotus tells us an apposite anecdote about Xerxes, the mighty king of Persia, who in 480 B.C. invaded Greece with an army of nearly two million men. Seeing the whole Hellespont filled with the vessels of his fleet, and the plains covered with his regiments, Xerxes at first congratulated himself on his good fortune and abilities. But then, a few moments later, he began to weep. His stunned uncle Artabanus, standing beside him, asked what a man in his position could possibly have to cry about. The king replied that he had just realised that in a hundred years’ time, all these men arrayed before him, every one of the soldiers and sailors with whose help he had terrified the known world, would be dead.
We might feel no less sad, and no less sceptical about the value of fleeting achievements and impermanent notions of meaning, if we were to study a picture of the participants at a Heinz Company convention held in Chicago in the spring of
1902. The image of all these earnest men, each with his excited plan for increasing sales of ketchup and pickles in stores across the United States, should be enough to make us weep with the bitterness of King Xerxes of Persia.
Heinz salesmen, closing banquet, sales convention, Chicago, 1902
Of course, the inevitable erasure of our earthly efforts at the hands of death is foreshadowed in other tasks besides conquering nations and building brands. We may observe a mother teaching her dimple-cheeked child to tie his shoelaces, and find ourselves haunted by an image of both of their eventual funerals. Nevertheless, we may conclude that bringing up a child is a more effective way of cheating death than selling condiments, or that helping a friend enjoys an advantage over leading an army.
“Vanity of Vanity, all is vanity,” lamented the author of Ecclesiastes (1:2). “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever (1:4).” And yet it may be that, as Christian moralists would argue, not all things are equally vain. In some parts of Christendom, beginning in the sixteenth century, a new and very specific artistic genre emerged that would capture the imagination of the art-buying classes for the next two hundred years. Examples of “vanitas art,” so named in tribute to Ecclesiastes, were hung in domestic environments, most often studies and bedrooms. Each still-life featured a table or sideboard on which was arranged a contrasting muddle of objects. There might be flowers, coins, a guitar or a mandolin, chess pieces, a book of verse, a laurel wreath or a wine bottle: symbols of frivolity and temporal glory. And somewhere among these would be set the two great symbols of death and the brevity of life: a skull and an hourglass.
The purpose of such works was not to send their viewers into a depression over the vanity of all things; rather, it was to embolden them to find fault with particular aspects of their own experience, while at the same time attending more closely to the virtues of love, goodness, sincerity, humility and kindness.
above: Philippe de Champaigne, Vanitas, circa 1671 opposite: Simon Renard de Saint-André, Vanitas, circa 1662
6.
If reflecting on our own mortality is instructive, we may also find some relief from status anxiety in dwelling on the deaths of other people—particularly those whose accomplishments in life have made us feel the most inadequate and envious. However forgotten and ignored we are, however powerful and revered others may be, we can take comfort in the thought that the lot of us will ultimately end up as that most democratic of substances: dust.
Outside the village of Walsingham, in Norfolk, in 1658, a farmer tilling his field felt his plough strike something odd. It turned out to be one in a row of fifty urns in which a group of aristocrats had been ceremoniously buried in either Roman or Saxon times. The discovery created a minor sensation in East Anglia, which soon enough came to the attention of a doctor living in Norwich. By the end of the year, Sir Thomas Browne, taking the long-buried urns as his starting point, had produced a digressive meditation on the futility of striving for worldly greatness, on human imperfectibility and on the related need to recognise our dependence on God for salvation. He entitled his essay “Urne-Buriall; or, A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk.”
“In a field of old Walsingham, not many moneths past, were digged up between fourty and fifty Urnes,” reported Browne in his characteristic cadenced, lumpy English, “deposited in a dry and sandy soile, not a yard deep, nor farre from one another … some containing two pounds of bones, distinguishable in skulls, ribs, jawes, thigh-bones and teeth.” What interested Browne was how the identities of the dead, in their day the wealthiest and most important people in the area, had been entirely lost to history. Some had theorised that the remains were those of Romans, for the burial site was not far from an old Roman garrison; Browne, however, conjectured that they were more likely to be “our Brittish, Saxon or Danish Forefathers. ” In any case, no one would ever know their names, let alone in what century they had lived and died. From this, Browne moved on to reflect on the power of time to make a mockery of all human claims to earthly achievement and distinction: “Who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried?” he asked, challenging the dead aristocrats, who must once have felt confident of their place in the world, and hosted receptions and played the lyre and looked proudly at themselves in the mirror in the morning. “There is no antidote against the opium of time,” Browne admonished. “Generations passe while some trees stand, and old Families last not three Oaks.” Rather than try to achieve fame on earth, the duty of the honest Christian was to make an impression “not in the record of man” but instead “in the Register of God.”
The message may seem a melancholy one, but it is arguably much more so for those who anchor their lives on the pleasures of a highstatus position than it is for those whom society ignores and who are therefore already well acquainted with the oblivion in which their privileged counterparts will someday join them. It is the rich, the beautiful, the famous and the powerful for whom death has in store the cruellest lessons—the very categories of people, that is, whose worldly goods take them, in the Christian understanding, furthest from God.
In England, in the middle of the eighteenth century, this Christian-inspired moral was given repeated expression by a group of poets known as the Graveyard School. The name referred to their specialty: poems in which the narrator finds himself in a churchyard on a starry, moonlit night and, beside some semidefaced graves, begins musing on the power of death to wipe away success and glory (a phenomenon that clearly did not distress the poets overmuch but seemed indeed to be a source of barely suppressed joy). In Edward Young’s poem “Night Thoughts” (1742), for instance, the speaker, sitting on a moss-covered gravestone, lets his mind turn to the shared fate of all the great men of the past:
The sage, peer, potentate, king, conqueror
Death humbles these.
Why all this toil for triumphs of an hour?
What though we wade in wealth, or soar in fame,
Earth’s highest station ends in “Here he lies”:
And “Dust to dust” concludes her noblest song.
Young’s contemporary, Robert Blair, in “The Grave” (1743), set in another churchyard, picked up on the same theme:
When self-esteem, or others’ adulation,
Would cunningly persuade us we are something
Above the common level of our kind
The grave gainsays the smooth-complexioned flattery
And with blunt truth acquaints us with what we are.
The message was reiterated by the most distinguished poet of the Graveyard School, Thomas Gray, in his “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751):
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth ever gave,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
For those treated roughly by society, there is some sweet, preemptive revenge to be had in anticipating the eventual demise of certain of its members.
A number of artists have similarly delighted in depicting their own civilisation in a tattered future form, as a warning to, and reprisal against, the pompous guardians of the age. So fond was one such, the eighteenth-century painter Hubert Robert, of painting the great buildings of modern France in ruins that he earned himself the sobriquet Robert des Ruines. Across the Channel, meanwhile, Robert’s contemporary Joseph Gandy would make a name for himself by portraying the Bank of England with its ceiling caved in.
Hubert Robert, Imaginary View of the Grande Gallerie of the Louvre in Ruins, 1796
Joseph Gandy, View of the Rotunda of the Bank of England in Ruins, 1798
Some seventy years later, Gustave Doré was to illustrate London as he fancied it would look in the twenty-first century. His latter-day version of ancient Rome is complete with a caped figure—identified in the work’s title as a New Zealander, an inhabitant of the country that in Doré’s day
symbolised the future—sketching the ruins of the then-brand-new Cannon Street Station, much as Grand Touring Englishmen had once gone to Athens or Rome to sketch the Parthenon or the Colosseum.
From the eighteenth century onwards, inspired by like sentiments, European travellers set out on journeys to contemplate ruins of the past: Troy, Corinth, Paestum, Thebes, Mycenae, Knossos, Palmyra, Baalbec, Petra and Pompeii. The Germans, masters that they were at formulating compound names for fugitive and rare states of the soul (We ltschmerz, Schadenfreude, Wanderlust, to cite just a few), coined terms to describe the new feeling for old stones: Ruinenempfindsamkeit, Ruinensehnsucht, Ruinenlust. In March 1787, Goethe twice visited Pompeii.“Many a calamity has happened in the world,” he wrote from Naples, “but never one that has caused so much entertainment to posterity as this one.” “What wonderful mornings I have spent in the Colosseum, lost in some corner of those vast ruins!” remembered Stendhal in his Promenades dans Rome (1829). After recommending ruin-gazing as “the most intense
Gustave Doré, The New Zealander, 1871
Above: David Roberts, General View of Baalbec, 1842 Left: David Roberts, Doorway at Baalbec, 1842
pleasure that memory can procure,” he went so far as to declare that the Colosseum was more attractive in its present, crumbling state than it ever could have been when newly built.
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” reads an inscription on the pedestal of a statue of Ramses II of Egypt, according to Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (1818). But there is no need for the mighty, or even the humble, to obey the second command, for the Pharaoh himself lies in pieces on the ground, and “round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Status Anxiety Page 16