Contemplating mortality is not about being prepared to die, it is about being prepared to live. And that is what I am doing now, more freely and more fully than I have since childhood. The cancer has not made life more precious – that would make it seem like something fragile to lock away in the cupboard. No, it has made it more delicious.*
Why not precious? For there is no death, only the death of you, me and them. There is eternal life. I don’t mean an afterlife as in Christian beliefs. Nor do I suggest that there’s an individual soul able to survive the return of the body to the clay from which it came.
Such beliefs surely arise from the wishful thinking prevalent in many human societies. They are part of our “denial of death”. These days scientists attempt to remove all causes of death, so that we can simply go on living, presumably until we pull the plug on ourselves—by assisted suicide, or some other kind of voluntary demise. This way we’ll bequeath our wealth in timely fashion and leave space for our great-grandchildren. It will be a wonderful world, with safety and equality for all. Progressive ideas will turn into everyday reality.
My quote at the head of this page is from Denise Inge, who found her vocation in the study of Thomas Traherne. He’s known as a 17th century Christian poet and mystic, but I prefer to call him an “ecstatic”. You could sum him up by one of his favourite words, “felicity”. He died young like his student Denise Inge: he at 35 in 1674, she at 51 in 2014. Reading their written works, I conclude that they felt the need to share the deliciousness they felt, for its essence lies in giving back what God had given them.
I was given a book as a Christmas gift: A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson. It’s not my thing but here it is, 500 pages of detailed facts starting from a nothingness without time or space followed by the Big Bang singularity and ending with a rueful look at how Man has caused the extinction of other species. In between, he has constantly reminded us how wondrously improbable the journey has been: aeons of creative randomness culminating in Us. Then he says,
I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn’t choose human beings for the job.
And if I were to choose a teacher to tell me the history of nearly everything, I wouldn’t choose a popularising journalist like Bill Bryson, whose 99% of everything carefully excludes Soul—which to me is a word that encompasses 100% of everything.
I would choose another ecstatic, such as Simone Weil. Fifteen years ago a dear friend wanted to send me a book, out of gratitude for all the essays I’d submitted to her journal “La Lettre Powysienne”. I was living in Jamaica at the time: it took weeks for her gift to get through Customs. It was La Pesanteur et La Grâce. When I got back to England I bought a translation—needing both to get a full grasp of her paradoxes and tentative ideas. Even then, there was much that did not speak to me. Now I can see a common thread in both: it is desire and enjoyment. Many of us have written off Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism (as in the Bhagavad Gita) on account of their perceived ascetic piety, as seen from the outside.
* From A Tour of Bones: Facing Fear and Looking for Life, by Denise Inge