I am reproached for writing too much about death. Please seek a less morbid subject, I am urged. Please do not indulge in the sadness which comes with death. There is so much sweetness and joy in life, why dwell on its end? Would it not be better to use what skill you have to take our minds off this terrible subject?
I appreciate the thoughts and try to take the advice. But in my heart of hearts I know that if we are to make the most out of life it is necessary to contemplate death since, as Saul Bellow remarked with great truth: “Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything clearly.”
Death is so terrifying that we avoid thinking about it. We let other things constantly preoccupy us. We flinch from the thought that there will come a time when we, or those we love, will no longer exist. We do not care to think that each day brings it closer. Stop for a moment and think about it. It is not easy. We cannot bear the pure and unrelenting senselessness of no longer being alive.
“Most things never happen: this one will.” Poets write more frequently about death than any other subject, except possibly love. That is not surprising. Death is a colossal subject – “nothing more terrible, nothing more true.”
Perhaps man’s most remarkable talent is for ignoring death. Coming to terms with it takes up a good deal of man’s time. Probably the chief way is in the form of religion and in that respect the only miracle worth talking about is immortality. But there is also literature. However, very often literature does not give us the hard truth about death. We are left feeling that somehow it is alright. Either because death isn’t going to happen (“one short sleep, we wake eternally”). Or, if it does happen, it is something we need not worry about (“so long as we exist, death is not with us, but when death comes, then we do not exist”). Or, if it does happen, it is really rather nice and comfortable (“in a sleep deeper and calmer than that of infancy, wrapped in the finest and softest dust”).
But all that is not the reality. Death is awful, ruthless, irretrievable, terrifying, and, above all, conclusively ends the glory and interest of being alive. That cannot be wrapped in circumlocutions. One poet who never tried to do so was Philip Larkin. “Death and the sun are not to be looked at steadily,” La Rochefoucauld said. Larkin at least tried to look at that terrible fire. And in doing so he wrote what is perhaps the single most terrifying poem about death that has ever been written.
A u b a d e
I work all day, and get half drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—-The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused – nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anesthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realization of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go,
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
So plainly written, terrifyingly plain. What else is there to say? Better, having read it to forget it and go out and enjoy the beauty of the living earth and love those whom most you love more fervently than ever and hate no one while life lasts for you and read, as I do every now and then, the following passage from one of the greatest stories ever written, Anton Chekhov’s The Lady with the Dog:
“Yalta was hardly visible through the morning mist; white clouds stood motionless on the mountain-tops. The leaves did not stir on the trees, grass-hoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundings – the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky – Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.”