On Being Mortal – a Literature Review
Given that most of us in SOFiA are in our 70s or 80s, it seems strange that death and mortality play such a small role in our writings. In what follows, your Editor attempts to fill this void and to come to grips with the fact that we are not immortal and that life will come to an end for us all. Many thinkers regard exploring death as like staring at the sun; something that’s impossible for more than a fleeting instant. However, the aim in this review is to build up a picture of what it means to be mortal, a biological creature with a limited lifespan, an individual that is facing its own death, by surveying what literature, medicine, psychotherapy and modern theology have to say about it.
Geering Controversy
Lloyd Geering famously said, “man has no immortal soul,” setting off another round of the Geering controversy. An immortal soul is like an indestructible core of our being. The body may perish but the soul goes on. So no problems with doing away with “immortal” but surely, “soul” or something like it, is something we want to affirm. That’s the person, the core of our being, our personality, our self, what makes us us. Lloyd also says that he is not afraid of dying. Well, maybe he has found the secret of dealing with death, or maybe he is in denial, like most of us. But can he help the rest of us who may not be as anxiety-free as he is? In what follows we will indeed assume that there is no real immortal soul, no indestructible entity that survives death. Rather, ‘soul’ is an emergent property of the brain and its physical body. It is not nothing, no matter how difficult it may be to explain just what ‘soul’ is.
Part 1: LITERATURE and MUSIC
With the demise of traditional notions of immortality and life after death, leadership in thinking about death (especially when it comes to practical wisdom) seems to have passed from the theologians to the poets, novelists, doctors, and psychotherapists. We turn now to novelists, poets and artists.
The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy
Ivan was an important functionary with marital difficulties, who, after seeing multiple doctors regarding a mysterious illness, concludes that he is dying. He found it difficult to grasp this. He was familiar with the syllogism, Caius is a man, all men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal. But somehow, this didn’t apply to him. He was not a man in the abstract, but a creature quite separate from all others. He tried to ignore this reality without success; it kept intruding on his consciousness. Other people were no help; it seemed that they were only interested in whether he would vacate his position and give them a chance to fill it. He was tormented by the lie or the deception that everyone claimed he was just ill, not dying. He found some comfort in the assistance of his servant Gerasim. As time went on, he began to question whether his whole life had been wrong. At the end, he recognized the suffering he was causing others, and, determined to put things right, briefly acted in relation to his wife and son and found that death and pain were no more, and instead there was light. Then he died.
Nothing to be Frightened Of
That’s the title of a book by Julian Barnes, a famous post-modern novelist. Death is the “nothing” that we are not to be frightened of, but that is a thought he expressed decades before the book, and death does seem to be something that haunts him. The book is a combination of memoir, memories of his parents and grandparents, together with reflections on many and varied authors and a meditation on death. It’s compelling reading, and the tone is lightened by a wonderful sense of humour.
We should not forget that prior to this book, Barnes gave us a post-modern version of heaven in the last chapter of “A History of the World in 10 1/2 chapters”. In The Dream, the protagonist is in a hotel-like situation. He is able to keep working on his golf indefinitely, getting his handicap down and down. Attempts to seduce the hotel staff get nowhere. Eventually, there seems no point in continuing with golf, when he has reached a state of unimprovable almost-perfection. So he decides for extinction. The moral of the story is, when you look closely at the much-vaunted advantages of immortality, they don’t actually stack up. Eventually, boredom and purposelessness increase to a point when it is not worth continuing. By contrast, being mortal creatures means that there is no time to do everything and to remediate bad decisions. This makes life, and the decisions we make in it, more critically important.
In Nothing to be frightened of, Barnes gives us vignettes describing he way he, his brother, his parents and grandparents, and a whole host of literary figures have faced or avoided death. Afraid of flying in his youth, he found that watching plane after plane take off or land while waiting for his flight, he lost that fear. However, the hope that the same might apply to death does not work. At the airport he watched people not die, but the death rate of the human race is nothing less than 100%. He also reflects on the alternatives we might face, even if we are unlikely to have a choice in the matter. Are you more afraid of dying or of death itself? He concluded that, logically, there is enough room in the brain for both. Would you like death to overtake you quickly, or have plenty of time to meditate on the end of life? If you find your faculties shutting down one by one, and the only brain activity left is causing you to fear death, you might wish for a quick end instead. Is it better to die before you are forgotten, or to be forgotten before you die? The realization that, while you are a popular novelist now, the number of your readers will gradually decline until there is only one left; a doctoral student a century from now might resurrect you from obscurity to write his thesis on you.
So being remembered is no enduring consolation. Even the human race and planet Earth will come to an end one day.
As an atheist who was never taken to church or Sunday school, Barnes has sympathy for Richard Dawkins, but he is not convinced by Dawkins’ attempt to counter fear of death by diverting our gaze to the vastness of the heavens, or by telling us, that merely by existing, we are extraordinarily lucky in comparison with all the logical possibilities inherent in our genes that never come to fruition.
And then there is the case of Eugene O’Kelly, chairman and CEO of an American accounting firm. Learning that he had inoperable brain cancer and only 100 days to live, he set out, as a goal-driven person and corporate competitor, to apply the skill set of a CEO to his predicament. He draws up a to-do list that includes unwinding his many friendships. Unwinding for his teenage daughter involved flying by private jet to Prague, Rome, and Venice, refuelling in the far North, which gives his daughter the chance to meet with the Inuit. An admirable approach, but he’s probably avoiding something through compulsive activity.
Artur Koestler recorded his experiences in prison during the Spanish Civil War. He concluded that “one’s disbelief in death grows in proportion to its approach” and that the mind plays tricks to deceive us, rather like Freud, who believed we couldn’t imagine our own death, and who wrote: “It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death, and whenever we attempt to do so, we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators.”
One Tree Hill by U2
This song is a memorial to Greg Carroll, a Maori boy who became a close associate of U2 and was killed in an accident while returning a motorcycle to Bono’s house in Dublin. U2 returned to NZ to attend Greg’s funeral. I’m struck by the freshness and originality of the images in the song. “The sun goes down in your eyes” as a metaphor for death. “We run like a river, runs to the sea,” as a metaphor for our journey to the end of life and merging to a great infinity. “Raining in the heart” as a metaphor for the experience of grief. The following link is to a 1988 promotional video that includes the song. https://norselandsrock.com/one-tree-hill-u2/
We turn away
To face the cold
Enduring chill
As the day begs
The night for mercy love
A sun so bright
It leaves no shadows
Only scars
Carved into stone
On the face of earth
The moon is up
And over One Tree Hill
We see the sun
Go down in your eyes
You run like a river
On like a sea
You run like a river
Runs to the sea
And in the world
A heart of darkness
A fire zone
Where poets speak their heart
Then bleed for it
It runs like a river
Runs to the sea
It runs like a river
To the sea
I don't believe
In painted roses
Or bleeding hearts
While bullets
Rape the night
Of the merciful, ah
I'll see you again
When the stars
Fall from the sky
And the moon
Has turned red
Over One Tree Hill
We run like a river
Runs to the sea
We run like a river
To the sea
And when it's raining
Raining hard
That's when the rain will
Break my heart
Raining, raining
In the heart
Raining in your heart
Raining, raining
To your heart
Raining, raining
Raining, raining
To your heart
Raining ooh, ooh
To your heart
To the sea
Oh, great ocean
Oh, great sea
Run to the ocean
Run to the sea
Life is Eternal by Carly Simon
Carly Simon is a pop singer, who wove the following traditional words into a modern song: “Life is eternal and love is immortal and death is only a horizon, and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.” These words are attributed to William Penn (1644 – 1718).
Life is Eternal
I've been doing a lot of thinking
About growing older and moving on
Nobody wants to be told that they're getting on
For a long, long stay
But just how long and who knows
And how and where my spirit will go
Will it soar like Jazz on a saxophone
Or evaporate on a breeze
Won't you tell me please
That life is eternal
And love is immortal
And death is only a horizon
Life is eternal
As we move into the light
And a horizon is nothing
Save the limit of our sight
Save the limit of our sight
Here on earth I'm a lost soul
Ever trying to find my way back home
Maybe that's why each new star is born
Expanding heaven's room
Eternity in bloom
And will I see you up in that heaven
In all its light will I know you're there
Will we say the things that we never dared
If wishing makes it so
Won't you let me know
That life is eternal
And love is immortal
And death is only a horizon
Life is eternal
As we move into the light
And a horizon is nothing
Save the limit of our sight
Save the limit of our sight
Friedensreich Hundertwasser
Hundertwasser was an unconventional Austrian artist who made his home in Aotearoa New Zealand. He was adamant that he should be buried naturally, and this required special Government permission, as it went against the regulations at that time. He wrote the following:
I am looking forward
To become humus myself
Buried naked without coffin
Under a beech tree planted by myself
On my Land in Aotearoa.
The interment should take place
Without a coffin, wrapped in a shroud,
In a Layer of earth at least 60 centimeters thick.
A tree should be planted on top of the grave
To guarantee that the deceased will Live on
Symbolically as well as in reality.
A dead person is entitled to reincarnation
In the form of, for example, a tree
That grows on top of him and through him.
The result would be a sacred forest of living dead.
A Garden of the Happy Dead.
Already with this brief survey of the arts we have a wonderful diversity of images that contrast with the monotony of Church tradition with respect to death. There’s Ivan Ilych, who changed his attitude to wife and son and found that his pain was not troubling him, the fear of death was gone and instead there was light. There’s Julian Barnes, whose dream shows that immortality is not what it was cracked up to be. Sooner or later, we would vote for oblivion. There’s Bono from U2, with the image of life as a river running to the sea, opening up to a great infinity and Hundertwasser, insisting on a natural burial and seeing the tree growing from his remains as a form of reincarnation. Now we are ready to look at the medical profession and psychotherapy in the next issue. Laurie Chisholm