light bulb in my mouth

[perlmonger]

Watching Andrew Marr’s programme about Hume and Edinburgh last night, and Hume’s acceptance of his mortality, left me thinking about death.

I’m with Hume on this; my only concerns about dying are of what difficulties and upset will be left for those who survive me and, inevitably, for things I’ll leave undone. I don’t want to stop being, because (these days; it was not always so) I mostly like be-ing, but ceasing to be has no fears in and of itself.

What I have noticed though, in the last year or so, is occasionally thinking that I won’t buy a book or a DVD because it feels a waste; because I’ll likely die before I get round to reading/watching the thing more than once. Something in my psyche is regarding the likely twenty-odd, possible thirty or forty years I have left as being a perceptibly approaching end. This, at least, I’m not sure I like: intellectually, I’d rather just carry on living in something close to the now and, well, just stop one day.

There. I’ll probably get eaten by the cats tomorrow :)

Comments

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

I find it goes in waves; some years I think a lot about not-being and then it evaporates for years and then it triggers again (obvious reason this year) and I do mental sums (will another 40 years be enough). tanais had the 'I'll never read all those books in my lifetime' downer the first time he went into the Bodleian at about 24 so it's either a quantity issue - or possibly the quality of the book/dvd vs the monetary and temporal cost - as much as an age one...

[budleysalterton.livejournal.com]

you're as old as the woman you feel.


errrr,

i'll just be somewhere else.

[thunderbox.livejournal.com]

There's a line in the Bhagavad-Gita which goes something like The ultimate irony of human life is that all around us we see death, and yet we live our lives as if we are immortal. I no longer think that's true, or if it is it's true only of the very young or the very naïve (but then sheltering people from death is a notable characteristic of western society).

Back when I was gainfully employed, we had a client who was Something In Developmental Psychology™ before deciding to go an make a metric shitload of money. I discussed this with him, and apparently there's a well-understood process where – somewhere in middle age – our existential view shifts from how long we've been here to how long we have left. What the lay person jokingly refers to as a mid-life crisis has good grounding.

I've never experienced your I won't have time to use that properly before I die, so I won't buy it (which strikes me as the inevitable consequence of an unreconstructed hippy reaching middle age), but I have fairly bitter experience of the related I'm going to drop dead any minute, there's no time to wait and I must do and have it all now. After my brother died I lost pretty much all capacity for medium or long-term planning; I spent all of my contingency funds, for example, on things I'd always wanted but could never justify before.

In the end, I think, the only solution is to live in the moment but with a weather-eye open towards the inevitable. Anything else will lead to one kind of madness or another. I dread the 1^st of June 2010 – for example – because it's the day I become older than my older brother. Having said that, I recognise that there's precisely no guarantee that I will make it to that date as a living, breathing human.

What terrifies me, though, is the process. What John Lanchester describes:

Not being here is in itself nothing to fear. The moment of transition, though – the moment of breaking through the veil of being-here and going through to notness, which presumably involves a terrible rending moment in which you realize what is happening, have full consciousness of what you are going through – now that seems to be worth fearing. If he could have a written guarantee from the responsible parties that death would be something he wouldn't notice – here one moment, gone the next, with no lived transition – he would feel perfectly sanguine, even gung-ho, about the whole business. But the thought that you would be aware of what was going on as you died implied that somewhere in the future was a moment of the purest terror, terror at 200 percent proof, so that you could have a small taste of the fear every time you let your mind touch on the subject, even for a second or two.

I've looked into someone's eyes as that recognition dawned, in a moment that arrived like a bolt from the blue. Now I'm privileged to watch it approach another loved-one at a creeping pace (though one would prefer it to be many times slower), and I'm still struggling for form a coherent humanist philosophy of acceptance. Oh it's easy enough with sky-fairies and an after-life, we all know that, but if one cannot invoke those then learning to accept the inevitable is probably the most challenging developmental task we face.