“To review philosophy is to be taught to die,” Montaigne wrote in his most famous essay as he reckoned with how to live. Certainly, we spend our lives studying to die whereas attempting to bear our mortality, utilizing our religions and our materialism to look away from the nice unknown, to fill with myths and negations what’s undeniably the supreme thriller on the opposite fringe of existence. We could know what happens to our physical being when we die, however what occurs to consciousness on the boundary of life stays the last word enigma.
A revelatory new study has discovered, via electrogram recordings, heightened mind exercise on the transition to demise: Upon being taken off life-support tools, sufferers exhibit a surge of gamma waves — mind exercise indicating amplified slightly than diminished consciousness. This discovering, refuting the traditional conception of demise as a fade-out of consciousness, calls to thoughts a beautiful line from a D.H. Lawrence poem composed on the finish of his life, depicting demise as “the final marvel.”
In a distinct poem from his ultimate years, Lawrence examines the uneasy relationship between our self-knowledge as creatures able to infinite emotional expertise and our data of our creaturely finitude:
Know thyself, and that thou artwork mortal.
However know thyself, denying that thou artwork mortal:
a factor of kisses and strife
a lit-up shaft of rain
a calling column of blood
a rose tree bronzey with thorns
a combination of yea and nay
a rainbow of affection and hate
a wind that blows forwards and backwards
a creature of gorgeous peace, like a river
and a creature of battle, like a cataract:
know thyself, in denial of all this stuff —
In consonance with Montaigne, Lawrence picks up the urgency of befriending our mortality within the poem I considered upon encountering these new findings concerning the dying-living mind:
THE SHIP OF DEATH
by D.H. LawrenceHave you ever constructed your ship of demise, or have you ever?
Oh construct your ship of demise, for you will have it.Now within the twilight, sit by the invisible sea
Of peace, and construct your little ship
Of demise, that can carry the soul
On its final journey, on and on, so nonetheless
So stunning, over the past of seas.When the day comes, that can come.
Oh consider it within the twilight peacefully!
The final day, and the setting forth
On the longest journey, over the hidden sea
To the final marvel of oblivion.Oblivion, the final marvel!
When we’ve trusted ourselves solely
To the unknown, and are taken up
Out of our little ships of demise
Into pure oblivion.Oh construct your ship of demise, be constructing it now
With dim, calm ideas and quiet fingers
Placing its timbers collectively within the nightfall,Rigging its mast with the silent, invisible sail
That may unfold in demise to the breeze
Of the kindness of the cosmos, that can waft
The little ship with its soul to the wonder-goal.Ah, if you wish to dwell in peace on the face of the earth
Then construct your ship of demise, in readiness
For the longest journey, over the past of seas.
Complement with Rebecca Elson’s excellent poem “Antidotes to Fear of Death” and Richard Dawkins on the luckiness of death, then revisit D.H. Lawrence on the key to living fully.
