The Mystery That Isn't

I just finished this Frank Kermode article in the New York Review of Books about the English writer Julian Barnes, who is obsessed with death. Barnes describes himself as a thanatophobe, or death-hater, who (according to Kermode) "dreams of oblivion and wakes in the night howling with terror." Barnes "insists that his fears are entirely rational," but Kermode never tells us what they are, which leaves the impression that Kermode shares them, or thinks he does, and assumes everyone else does likewise.

Barnes's novels, which are apparently offered as explorations of the subject of death, sound rather unpromising. One of Barnes's characters is asked "is it death itself he fears, or oblivion?" He replies that he fears both. His interlocutor, supposedly a quasi-ominscient computer, cannot think of a better response than that everybody dies. The character then offers the closest thing to an explanation for his fear Kermode shares with us, which is to say that it "results not from the fear of pain but from 'the fear of inevitability of non-pain.'"

None of this makes any sense at all, and I think that fact points toward a central feature of common Western notions about death, which is an a priori assumption that it constitutes some great deep mystery, intrinsically exempt from the rules we use to evaluate other theories and ideas. Certainly Barnes seems to approach it that way, and Kermode is apparently in sync with him. He concludes the article with the observation that in dealing with death, "[i]t seems that nothing really helps any more. We know nothing about the matter that entitles us to have an opinion on it."

This statement is simply bewildering. It suggests that death is too obscure to enable us to understand anything about it, but what seems more likely is that Barnes and Kermode choose not to accept what they understand perfectly well. The most obvious and likely analog for death has been known to humans since they first came to understand what an electrical circuit is. Death is a turning-off, like opening a circuit—though given that "opening" implies a switch, it would more accurate to say, like breaking a circuit. The organism turns off and becomes inanimate matter. There is no mystery in this.

To be sure, we can create a mystery by imagining that death has further implications. Most obviously, if we posit a soul, meaning an immaterial reflection or manifestation of the self, then we have to account for what happens to it upon death of the body. Perhaps the soul survives; indeed, if it is truly immaterial and distinct from the body, how can it die? But mysteries like these are the product of pure fancy. There is no reason to posit a soul, no question it answers—or answers satisfactorily.

In any event, these do not seem to be the mysteries that render Barnes and Kermode so intellectually helpless. Nobody outside the churches wants to argue about souls any more. So Barnes has a character say that he fears oblivion, which simply makes no sense. We experience oblivion every night when we sleep (excluding of course the time when we are dreaming). Death is simply a dreamless sleep from which we do not awaken. Lamentable it may be, deplorable, even tragic—but how can it be frightening?

Death makes us want to ask, "How can it be that this wonderful thing—me—will be simply turned off, like a lightbulb?" But this is not a true mystery, for it is perfectly obvious how it can be, and indeed how it is. The mystery is better stated, "How could it be ... ?" How could the universe, God, reality be so cruel? But this is mere self-pity, and of a particularly toxic kind. The universe inflicts this seeming cruelty the same way it awards us the great gift of life in the first place—and in the case of us humans, not just life but intellect: Because that's how animate matter works. And the universe does not hear our complaining, because to it we are mere atoms in a vast fabric. Very lucky atoms, in our ability to feel and think and taste and hear, but still atoms, who in the nature of things must give way to new and, eventually, improved ones.

Mortality is the name of the game as long as nature is in charge. If we live long enough—if we do not destroy ourselves before we reach our potential—we may conquer death. I suspect when we do we will learn that living forever is not what it's cracked up to be. Still, I think it's legitimate to wish that we lived longer, provided we stayed young enough to enjoy it. But acknowledging that wish is a far cry from dissolving into puddles of fear merely because we're doomed to wear out and stop running some day.

Needless to say, I'll be giving Mr. Barnes a rather wide berth in my own journey to oblivion.

The Long Movie (But Not Long Enough)

Think of life as a movie. At some point you realize you're sitting in a theater with a lot of other people, having this experience. Then you notice that every now and then an usher comes down the aisle, taps a fellow moviegoer on the shoulder, and escorts him out of the auditorium. None of those ushered out come back. You don't know where they're going -- the ushers aren't talking -- but some of the people sitting around you are only too happy to offer elaborate explanations. They seem to feel very strongly about their theories, even fight over them, though as far as you can tell they're all just guesswork, fantasies, fever dreams. Still, some people find them very seductive, and become more concerned with them than with the movie.

You're pretty sure that outside the theater there is -- nothing. This is a troubling thought, even a tragic one, but not terrifying. The true challenge is to appreciate the movie, to experience it as fully and valuably as possible, while knowing that it will all be taken from you, or (the same thing) you from it. The movie is all there is. There is nothing else to be conscious of. Without it, there is nothing for your self to function upon. In order to be, you need the movie. Without it, you will cease to exist.

So the fact of your eventual removal from the theater is a great misfortune. The end of everything. But if it is so, it is so. What is not so is that some further experience will follow this one. This movie has no sequel -- no green mansions, no rapture, no camphor fields, no lake of fire, no returning to another body.

So there's good news and bad news: You got into the theater. But for one night only.

This is the hypothesis. Still to come: why it's worth embracing.

Grand Funkiphany

Once in a while you get shown the light
In the strangest of places, if you look at it right.

• Hunter/Garcia, "Scarlet Begonias"

... you'll die when you die ...

• Grand Funk Railroad, "I Can Feel Him in the Morning"

The truth about our lives is all around us, and the untruth about them too. We have to decide which to hear -- the quiet sanity of the world as it is, or the insistent holler of the world as we, or somebody, wants it to be.

The truth never communicates itself to us. More precisely, we can never hear the truth when it's hard, even if it talks right to us. It's not that the truth plays games with us, the way various gods are thought to toy with their would-be protectees. The reality of human existence is not being coy with us, not obscuring itself in any way. It is we who decline to see what our eyes and ears tell us.

What our eyes and ears tell us is that when someone dies, their body ceases to function. That's what we know. The supposition that there is a "soul" or other component of the individual that continues to exist is quite silly, and easily explained. To a primitive, the body's ceasing to function must itself have seemed miraculous. How explain the fact that a living breathing feeling organism suddenly ceases to be any of those things, just stops working? It is quite natural for people without knowledge of biology to suppose that some animate principal that lived inside the body has now left it. This is not an insane idea, just a mistaken one -- or more precisely, one for which there is no support other than uncountable tons of wishful thinking.

There are many reasons to want to believe our personality survives death. None of them are good enough to blind ourselves to the obvious fact of the matter, which is that when we die we no more survive than a fire does after it burns out.