We think we differ from other animals because we can envision our deaths, when we know no more than they do about what death brings. Everything tells us that it means extinction, but we cannot begin to imagine what that means. The truth is, we do not fear the passing of time because we know death. We fear death because we resist passing time. If other animals do not fear death as we do, it is not because we know something they do not. It is because they are not burdened by time.
We think of suicide as a uniquely human privilege. We are blind to how alike are the ways in which we and other animals do away with ourselves. Until a century or so ago, it was common for people to let themselves be carried off by pneumonia (‘the old man’s friend’) or to step up their daily intake of opiates until they fell asleep for ever. The men and women who did this turned towards death, sometimes consciously, but more often in an instinctual movement no different from that in which a cat seeks a quiet place to see out its end.
As humanity has become more ‘moral’, it has put such deaths beyond reach. The Greeks and the Romans chose death rather than a worthless life. Today we have made a fetish of choice; but a chosen death is forbidden. Perhaps what distinguishes humans from other animals is that humans have learnt to cling more abjectly to life.
One of the few statements by a European writer that the deaths of humans are no different from those of other animals appears under the name of Bernardo Soares.
If I carefully consider the life a man leads, I find nothing to distinguish it from the life an animal leads. Both man and animal are hurled unconsciously through things and the world; both have interludes of amusement; both daily follow the same organic itinerary; both think nothing beyond what they think, nor live beyond what they live. A cat wallows in the sun and goes to sleep. Man wallows in life, with all its complexities, and goes to sleep. Neither one escapes the fatal law of being who or what it is.
‘Bernardo Soares’ was one of many imagined identities assumed by the great Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. Some truths cannot be told except as fiction.