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

[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.