To Live, We Must Accept that We Will Die
Go gentle into that good night.
In his poem ‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’, Dylan Thomas exhorts us to ‘burn and rave’ as death approaches: not to resign ourselves to our dying but to fight against it. Wise men, wild men, good men, and grave men do not give into death without struggle, he says. In every case, they know there is more they could, or should, have done.
For us humans, death is the inevitability that gives all things their value. We understand our lives are bounded by nothingness, and this finitude gives them their significance. What can be enjoyed and enjoyed soon bores us; and what is easily replaced fast starts to seem expendable. Life is precious to us because once it passes we can never get it back, and the process of dying starts at the moment of our birth. Sand begins to fall into the bottom of the hourglass, and as we grow older we must realise that soon, there will be none of it left at the top. Our happiness rests on this on this realisation: we will die.
What can be enjoyed and enjoyed soon bores us, and what is easily replaced fast starts to seem expendable.
Perhaps there is also a right time to die, and for the ancients, this was long before the mental and physical decline to which, thanks to advances in medicine, most of us moderns can look forward. The dilemma facing Achilles following his row with Agamemnon, and the subsequent choice that he makes, casts light on the ancient belief of warrior-peoples in this. They believed in the primacy glory over life, and in the primacy of death over shame. Battle gave these men the opportunity to achieve glory, which is timeless, and to have some say in the time of their dying. In this way, they could avoid living so long as to witness a reversal in their fortunes which, over a long-enough life, is inevitable.
Notions of glory and dishonour seem quaint to the modern sensibility. But when we consider the matter seriously, death is not the worst thing that can happen to us. Commonplace expressions confirm this. We will describe some outcome as ‘a fate worse than death’, or say that ‘I would rather die’ than such-and-such. We may, in moments of strong emotion, say something to the effect of: thank heavens that so-and-so ‘did not live long enough to see’ this or that. No doubt we speak in this way for comic effect at times (‘I would rather die than endure another half an hour of this play’); but these idioms suggest nonetheless that death does not come first in the long list of misfortunes that may befall us, and we may not find the strength to ‘meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same’, in Kipling’s immortal phrasing.
Death does not come first in the long list of misfortunes that may befall us.
This directs our attention to the aspirations of transhumanism, whose advocates aim to prolong life indefinitely. Like the ill-fated boors of Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale, they have set out to kill Death; but success in such a venture would bring them only misery. A life without the possibility of death is not life but merely liveliness. It is a life that would soon resemble those of the vampires of Jim Jarmusch’s film, Only Lovers Left Alive — a life characterised by boredom, despondency, and apathy at the ordinary goings-on of the world. Only the possibility of suicide can give such a life any meaning. The transhumanists repudiate this, and see nothing wrong with cluttering up our crowded earth with themselves, denying their successors what is theirs and imposing an even greater burden on the natural world than it must bear already.
By refusing to acknowledge our mortality, denying it, or trying to overcome it — superficially, through cosmetic surgery, for example, or in on other ways, such as through special diets, vitamin regimes and so on — we strip our lives of their enchanting gloss. Through the things we do to prolong our lives at any cost, we teach ourselves that our highest goal is merely to carry on living, never pausing to wonder why such a goal is worth pursuing. Like fear, which steals from today in its obsession with tomorrow, denying the fact of our dying wastes time. For every moment that we ‘burn and rave’ against death, we lose a little life.
Through the things we do to prolong our lives at any cost, we teach ourselves that our highest goal is merely to carry on living.
By accepting death, in contrast, we learn that life is a matter of quality, not quantity, and we give ourselves a chance to escape it, if only for a moment. In those moments we experience the eternity Eliot spoke of when he wrote that ‘only in time can the moment in the rose-garden, / The moment in the arbour where the rain beat, / The moment in the draughty church at smokefall / Be remembered; involved with past and future. / Only through time time is conquered.’ In smiling back at death we express the only virtue which cannot be faked, which is courage. And so we live like the lilies of the field, and spare no thought for the morrow. What we learn is that Seneca was right: that ‘life is long if you know how to use it.’
Dylan Thomas is perhaps right in saying we ought not to resign ourselves to dying, to be dragged unhappily into the void. But we ought not to spend our lives resisting our dying, either. Rather, we should accept it, as soon as can, as the ultimate reason why anything we do in this life, for ourselves and for each other, matters at all. What we may just find by doing this is that more and more, we are able to escape the world of getting and spending, and the profound confusion and sadness these things conceal.
