Last week, I told a story about sitting at a stoplight while a long funeral procession drove by. It happened at a moment I was particularly aware of my own mortality. So I’ve been thinking a lot about the impermanence of life.
This week’s post, is something of a book report. It’s a book most sane people never need to read – almost 400 pages of pretty dense writing. I let my kindle read it to me while I was on the treadmill over the course of a couple of months. Even so, it made a pretty deep impact on me.
Ernest Becker won the Pulitzer prize in 1974 for the book, The Denial of Death. In it, he disputes Freud’s contention that the fundamental tension inherent in the human condition has to do with sex (eros). Instead, our fundamental struggle, he says, is grappling with the reality of our inevitable and inescapable deaths.
You and I, Becker insists, carry a sense of transcendence within ourselves. We have these great big prefrontal cortexes. They give us the ability to experience parts of reality other animals don’t. A cow in a field, munching on grass, has a very different response to the murder of a cow beside him. Were her companion to have her throat slit and fall to the ground, she would look blankly, then return to munching grass. You and I, on the other hand, have brains with the capacity to imagine, to extrapolate, and to plan. We’d bolt! We’d run like hell!
This imaginative capacity, Becker insists, is at the root of our human struggle. You and I have the ability to imagine transcendence, eternity. We can envision a reality beyond time, beyond our lifetimes, beyond history. “Eternity in our hearts,” it has been called. We have this incredible capacity to imagine, or to sense, timelessness and immortality.
The problem is, that we carry this incredible capacity to experience ourselves within eternity – inside bodies that each day are marching us closer and closer to our deaths.
That’s the fundamental tension that drives human struggle – a deep and abiding sense of transcendent eternity, housed in mortal, decaying bodies.
It would be easy if we, like the animals, could not imagine transcendence.
It would also be easy if our bodies lasted as long as the timelessness our brains can imagine.
But we can – and they don’t.
At the heart of all of the world’s religions and philosophical systems, Becker contends, is the struggle to deal with this predicament.
What we usually do is gloss it over. We usually get busy living life, having babies, working and buying and selling. We put death out of our minds – and out of days. We move death to nursing homes and hospitals. We get busy living life and if ever we have to walk by the graveyard, we whistle. Even we Christians tend to gloss over death. We focus our story of death on an afterlife that claims more certitude than we can authentically claim.
How we live is determined by how we handle this fundamental struggle. How do you handle it?
That’s what I’ve been thinking about the last few weeks. Last week I quoted John Donne, paraphrased like this: “Don’t ask for whom the funeral bell tolls. It tolls for every one of us, for you, for me. We are connected, all of us, in this deep struggle – hearts of eternity bound up in bodies of death.”
So, what do we do with the struggle?
What do you do? How do you handle this existential struggle?
I’d love to hear what you’re thinking in the comment section below.
More next week.
This was beautiful, thanks for writing. I have to admit, it’s only been very recently that I’ve noticed a shift in my perception of death – that it actually has begun to seem disagreeable at all. My dad picked on me as a kid for being so dark, because I loved poems about death (Thanatopsis, by William Cullen Bryant, in particular), and I loved the symbolism and silence of winter. I’ve always been really moved when I walk by cemeteries. Death has always held a certain spiritual and poetic appeal to me that I can’t explain. I have a memory of being moved to tears as a teenager when my sister asked, “What if you knew this was your last day on earth?”, and I said how full of joy I would be to think of finally seeing what might be on the other side, discovering what was really there and what I would be! It’s strange. I’m more afraid of being left behind by those I love than of dying myself. But now, when I look at my daughter, I really do *want* to keep being here, and I feel like I belong in this world. Which is good, and healthy. I’m trying to hold onto that feeling.
“For my youngest I’ve always been worried I’ll be too old to understand his world and be detached due to age. That leads to my worry that I may not have enough time left to really bond with him and see his life unfold like his older siblings.”
I really connected with this. I have children who were 15 and 13 when my youngest was born. I loved her dearly but felt disconnected from the start when the older kids mothered her so much that I felt out of the loop. While the attention she got as a baby was great for the her, 24 years later she’s just beginning her adult out-of-college life and I’m retired, feeling isolated and unplugged from her. It was her teen years that were my biggest challenge.
I hope that your story unfolds in a better way.
Having a 16 and 14 year old and now a 22 month old, I often think of my age, currently 41, and where my kids will be at certain points of their life. For my teens, it’s great. I have enough life experience behind me and feel settled enough in my own life to be able to help them through tough times and give advice they will hopefully heed now and in the years to come, like my Father. For my youngest I’ve always been worried I’ll be too old to understand his world and be detached due to age. That leads to my worry that I may not have enough time left to really bond with him and see his life unfold like his older siblings. What will I miss?
michael:)
i just binge-watched the series “the west wing” on netflix. i watched these people live a profoundly heady experience for the 7 years the series ran, i watched them age, i watched one of them die, and another nearly so. it was a metaphor for life. it comes — and it goes. and it does so rapidly.
what keeping our deaths in mind does, is allow us to keep our minds on what matters each moment, each day we get with our children. i started w/ children too, and i do worry about how robust i’ll be as a grandfather. but the point of keeping our deaths in mind, is to keep ourselves rooted in the present moment, extracting what can we extracted from each of them.
(and go to the gym! and do crossword puzzles!
d.
you’re a good woman, trisha!
Funny you are on this topic. I can’t wait for your conclusions. Since I retired 20 plus years ago and stopped making money, raising children, buying and selling stuff, this is the main thing I have been thinking about. Kind of gruesome huh.
Hurry, I am pretty old now. What’s the answer 🙂 Gary
you’re a hoot, gary!
d.
I’m with Jaimie. It’s life that’s scary. Death is easy. Anyone can do it.
i’ve had a similar past – moved by many of the same things you have.
d.