“To die is totally different from what anybody supposed, and luckier,” wrote Walt Whitman a century and a half earlier than Richard Dawkins thought-about the luckiness of death as a radiant token of the inconceivable odds of getting lived in any respect. Dying — the harrowing reality of our mortality — is the central animating power of life, the one nice terror for which we have now devised the coping mechanisms of affection and artwork. All the things we make, all the pieces we do, is a bid for bearing our transience. And but that is the native poetry of the cosmos — in a universe churned by entropy, the actual fact of our impermanence is life’s most enduring source of meaning.
That’s what the uncommonly poetic and penetrating Annie Dillard explores all through her e book For the Time Being (public library), printed within the ultimate 12 months of the world’s deadliest century.
With an eye fixed to sand — Earth’s emissary of deep time, builder and dismatler of civilizations — Dillard writes:
Since sand and grime pile up on all the pieces, why does it look recent for every new crowd? As pure and human particles raises the continents, vegetation grows on the piles. It’s all a stage set — we all know this — a short lived stage on prime of many layers of phases, however yearly fungus, micro organism, and termites carry off the outdated layer, and yearly a brand new crop of sand, grass, and tree leaves freshens the set and perfects the phantasm that ours is the brand new and pressing world now. When Keats was in Rome, he noticed pomegranate timber overhead; they bloomed in grime blown onto the Colosseum’s damaged partitions. How can we doubt our personal time, wherein every vivid prompt probes the longer term? We stay and transfer by splitting the sunshine of the current, as a canoe’s bow elements water.
In each arable soil on this planet we develop grain over tombs — certain, we all know this. However don’t the useless generations appear to us darkish and nonetheless as mummies, and their instances all the time pale like scenes painted on partitions at Pompeii?
We stay on mined land. Nature itself is a laid entice. Nobody makes it by; nobody will get out.
“You don’t must assume very onerous to understand that our dread of each relationships and loneliness,” David Foster Wallace wrote as he reckoned with mortality and redemption, “has to do with angst about demise, the popularity that I’m going to die, and die very a lot alone, and the remainder of the world goes to go merrily on with out me.” In consonance with Wallace, Dillard writes:
Are we prepared to consider all humanity as a dwelling tree, carrying on splendidly with out us? We simply regard a beehive or an ant colony as a single organism, and even a faculty of fish, a flock of dunlin, a herd of elk. And we simply and appropriately regard an mixture of people, a sponge or coral or lichen or slime mould, as one creature — however us? Once we individuals differ, and know our consciousness, and love? Even lovers, even twins, are strangers who will love and die alone. And we prefer it this fashion, no less than within the West; we want to endure any agony of isolation moderately than to merge and extinguish our selves in an summary “humanity” whose destiny we should always maintain dearer than our personal. Who may say, I’m in agony as a result of my baby died, however that’s all proper: Mankind as a complete has plentiful youngsters? The spiritual thought ultimately challenges the notion of the person. The Buddha taught every disciple to conquer his fancy that he possessed a person self. Huston Smith means that our individuality resembles a snowflake’s: The seas evaporate water, clouds construct and free water in snowflakes, which dissolve and go to sea. The simile galls. What have I to do with the ocean, I with my distinctive and novel hexagons and spikes? Is my very thoughts a wave within the ocean, a wave the wind flattens, a flaw the wind attracts like a finger?
We all know we should yield, if solely intellectually. Okay, we’re a awful snowflake. Okay, we’re a tree. These useless family members we mourn have been solely these brown decrease branches a tree shades and kills because it grows; the tree itself is prospering. However what sort of tree are we rising right here, that may very well be value such waste and ache? For every of us loses all we love, everybody we love. We grieve and depart.
Complement with Marcus Aurelius on embracing mortality and the key to living fully, Rilke on befriending our transience, Marguerite Duras on our only taste of immortality, and physicist Alan Lightman on what actually happens when we die, then revisit Dillard on how to live with mystery and what Earth’s most otherworldly tree teaches us about being human.
