Lucas Cranach the Elder, Fountain of Youth, 1546 (Gemäldegalerie). (Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany. © Leemage/Bridgeman Images.)
SOME TIME IN THE NINETIES, when I was visiting Berlin, the writer Stan Persky took me to see Lucas Cranach the Elder’s painting of the Fountain of Youth at the Gemäldegalerie. It is a medium-sized canvas that depicts, in great detail, a rectangular swimming pool, seen in perspective, full of happily cavorting men and women. Old people are arriving from the left in carts and wheelbarrows; youths emerge naked from the other side, where a series of red tents await them, like those bathing-machines of which Lewis Carroll’s Snark was so inordinately fond.
The Cranach painting led Stan and me into a discussion of whether we would like to extend the length of our lives, if such a thing were possible. I said that the foreseeable end did not frighten or worry me; on the contrary, I liked the idea of living with a conclusion in mind, and compared an immortal life to an endless book which, however charming, would end up being tiresome. Stan, however, argued that living on, perhaps forever (provided he were free of sickness and infirmities), would be an excellent thing. Life, he said, was so enjoyable, that he never wanted it to end.
When we had that conversation, I was not yet fifty; more than fifteen years later, I am more convinced than ever that an endless life is not worth living. It is not that I think I have many decades left to go: it is difficult to be certain without holding the entire volume in my hands, but I’m fairly sure that I’m on one of the last chapters. So much has occurred, so many characters have come and gone, so many places have been visited that I don’t suppose the story can continue for many more pages without petering out into an incoherent and incontinent babble.
Lucas Cranach the Elder, Fountain of Youth, 1546 (Gemäldegalerie). (Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany. © Leemage/Bridgeman Images.)
“The days of our age,” the Psalmist tells us, “are threescore years and ten; and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years: yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow; so soon passeth it away, and we are gone.” I am now less than a decade away from that figure, which until recently seemed to me as remote as the last digit of pi. I realize that in what I must now call my old age, my body is constantly shuffling its weight upon my conscious mind, as if jealous of the attention I give my thoughts and trying to edge them out by brute force. Up to a short time ago, I had imagined that my body ruled only over my youth, and that with maturity, my mind would take the privileged place. And because of the hold I believed each one, body and mind, had upon a distinct half of my life, I imagined that they would reign unobtrusively and fairly, one in quiet succession after the other.
In the beginning, I suspect, that is how it was. In my adolescence and early adulthood, my mind seemed like a jumbled, uncertain presence, clumsily intruding upon the carefree life of the ruling body, which took pleasure wherever it found it. Paradoxically, my body felt then less solid than my thoughts, and made its presence felt only through my eclectic senses, smelling the cool air of the morning or walking through a city at night, eating breakfast in the sunshine or holding my lover’s body in the dark. Even reading was a bodily activity: the touch, the smell, the look of the words on a page were an essential part of my relationship to books.
Now pleasure comes mainly through thinking, and dreams and ideas seem richer and clearer than ever before. The mind wants to come into its own, but the old body, like a deposed tyrant, refuses to withdraw and insists on constant attention: biting, scratching, pressing, howling, or falling into a state of numbness or unwarranted exhaustion. A leg burns, a bone chills, a hand seizes up, an anonymous bluntness prods me somewhere in the gut, distracting me from books and conversation and even from thought itself. In my youth, I always felt as if I were on my own, even in the company of others, because my body never nagged me, never appeared as something separate from me, as a shameful Doppelgänger. It was absolutely and indivisibly my whole self, singular, invincible, casting no shadow, like the body of Peter Schlemiel. Now even when I’m alone my body is always there like an unwelcome visitor, making noises when I want to think or sleep, elbowing my side when I sit or walk about.
In a Brothers Grimm tale I liked as a child, Death is struck down on a country road and is rescued by a young peasant. To thank him for his deed, Death makes his rescuer a promise: since he cannot exempt him from dying, for all men must die, before coming for him Death will send his messengers. Several years later, Death appears at the peasant’s door. The terrified man reminds Death of his promise. “But have I not sent you my messengers?” Death asks. “Did not Fever come and smite you, and shake you, and cast you down? Has Dizziness not bewildered your head? Have not Cramps twitched your limbs? Did not Toothache bite your cheeks? And besides that, has not my own brother Sleep reminded you every night of me? Did you not lie by night as if you were already dead?”
My body seems to welcome these messengers daily, preparing to receive their master. The prospect of a longer sleep doesn’t trouble me, and that too has changed. In my youth, death was merely part of my literary imagination, something that happened to evil stepmothers and stout-hearted heroes, to evil Professor Moriarty and brave Alonso Quijano. The end of a book was conceivable and (if the book was good) lamented, but I could not picture the possibility of my own end. Like all young people, I was immortal, and time had been granted to me without term of expiration. As May Swenson put it:
Can it be there was only one
summer that I was ten? It must
have been a long one then—
Today, summers are so short that barely have we put out the garden chairs when we are storing them away again; we hang up the Christmas lights for what seems only a few hours, while the new year comes and goes, and a new decade follows. This rush doesn’t unsettle me: I’m accustomed to the accelerated pace of the final pages in a story I’ve enjoyed. I feel some mild regret, yes. I am aware that the characters I grew to know so well will have to say their few last words, perform their last gestures, circle just one more time around the inaccessible castle, or drift away into the sea fog strapped onto the back of a whale. But everything that needed to be tidied up is tidied up, and anything that must remain unresolved will remain unresolved. I know that my desk is ordered to my satisfaction, my letters mostly answered, my books in their right places, my writing more or less finished (not my reading, but that, of course, is the nature of the beast). My list of “Things to Do,” propped up in front of me, still has a number of uncrossed items on it; but they have always been there and they always will, however many times I reach the bottom of the list. Like my library, my list of “Things to Do” is not meant ever to be exhausted.
Talmudists say that the stern injunction to make certain, through thoughts and deeds, that one’s name is written in the Book of Life means that we ourselves must become responsible for that inscription, that we must be our own scribes. In that case, for as long as I can remember, I have been writing my name in the words of others, taking dictation, as it were, from those authors (such as Stan Persky) whom I’ve had the fortune to make mine through their books. Petrarch, in one of his letters, confesses that he has read Virgil, Boethius, and Horace not once but thousands of times, and that if he stopped reading them now (he is writing at the age of forty), for the rest of his life their books would still remain within him, “since they have dug their roots into my heart, so deeply that often I forget who wrote them and, like someone who because of having owned and made use of a book for so long, I become myself its author and hold it for my own.” I echo his words. As Petrarch understood it, the intimate conviction of readers is that there are no individually written books: there is only one text, infinite and fragmented, through which we leaf with no concern for continuity or anachronism or bureaucratic property claims. Since I first started reading, I know that I think in quotations and that I write with what others have written, and that I can have no other ambition than to reshuffle and rearrange. I find great satisfaction in this task. And at the same time, I’m convinced that no satisfaction can be truly everlasting.
I find it easier to imagine my own death than to imagine the death of everything. In spite of theology and science fiction, the end of the world is difficult to conceive from our egocentric viewpoint: what is the stage like once the audience has departed? What does the aftermath of the last universal moment look like once there is no one left to see it? These seemingly trite conundrums show up to what point our capacity to imagine is bound by the consciousness of the first-person singular.
Seneca tells the story of the ninety-year-old Sextus Turannius, an administrator under Caligula, who, when the emperor relieved him of his post, “ordered his household to lay him out and start wailing about his bed as if he were dead. The household went into mourning for the unemployment of their aged master and did not lay their mourning aside until his work was restored to him.” With this stratagem, Turannius achieved what appeared to be impossible and became a witness to his own funeral. Seventeen centuries later, and for less practical reasons, the eccentric American businessman “Lord” Timothy Dexter faked his own death in order to see how people would react. Since the apocryphal widow didn’t show enough signs of distress at the funeral, upon restoring himself to life, the disappointed Dexter gave her a tremendous beating.
My imagination is more modest: I simply see myself concluded, devoid of decisions, of thoughts, fears and emotions, no longer here and now in any perceptible sense, unable to use the verb “to be.”
There is . . . no death . . . There’s only . . . me . . . me . . . who’s dying . . .
—ANDRÉ MALRAUX, La Voie royale
The world is always here, but we are not. However, in the Commedia there is no death. Or rather, the death of the souls that Dante meets has taken place before the story starts. After that, every human soul in the three terrible kingdoms is alive until the Day of Judgment. As Dante finds, the death of the body has stripped the individuals of very little except perhaps a will of their own. And language is still theirs, so that both the lost and the saved can put into words who they were and who they are, and relive the moment of their death now translated into words. The fleeting references to individual deaths are many: among the most prestigious, that of Virgil, who tells Dante that his body, “within which I made shadow,” was moved from Brindisi and lies buried in Naples; that of Beatrice, who accuses Dante of betraying her when she “was on the threshold / of my second age” (she died at the age of twenty-five); the terrible death of Count Ugolino, immured in the Tower of Hunger by his enemy Cardinal Ruggiero and condemned to die of starvation and devour his own children (according to Borges, in the historical reality he must have done one or the other, but in the poem he does both); the suicides in the bloody forest; the briefly announced death of Peter Damian; and that of Manfred discussed earlier.1 The Commedia is an exercise not in death but in the memory of death. To know what awaits him, the mortal Dante asks questions of those who have undergone the experience of mortality. That is where his curiosity leads him.
In the “awful place,” Virgil tells him, he will see “the ancient suffering souls / each crying out for a second death,” begging for the ultimate annihilation announced in the book of the Apocalypse (the Revelation of Saint John in the English-language canon).2 According to its author, John of Patmos, on that dreadful day the dead will arise to be judged, and will seek their name in the Book of Life: if it does not appear in the inconceivable pages, they are condemned to the flames for all eternity. “And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire,” says John. “This is the second death” (Rev. 20:14).
Allegorically, in Christian Europe, the iconography of Death has ancient roots: the animated skeleton represented, for example, in a Pompeian mosaic begins its first macabre dance in the early Middle Ages, calling all people to join him (or her, because in the Latin languages Death is a woman), the young and old, the rich and poor. This terrifying image of Death is not universal. For instance, Yukio Mishima, writing in 1967, observed,
The Japanese people have always been conscious of the fact that death lies in wait behind all everyday actions. But their idea of death is straightforward and joyful. A different idea from the abominable and horrendous notion of death that foreigners have. The concept of a personified death in the guise of a skeleton carrying a scythe, like that imagined by the Europeans in the Middle Ages, did not exist in Japan. It is also different from the idea of death as lord and master that is prevalent in those countries where, to this day, next to modern cities and under the blazing sun, stand ancient ruins covered by a luxuriant vegetation. I mean those of the Aztec and Toltec people of Mexico. No, ours is not an aggressive death, but a sort of fountain of pure water from which streams are born that run endlessly throughout the world, and that, for a long time now, have nurtured and enriched the art of the Japanese people.3
Whether death is to be happily expected or tremblingly dreaded, the question remains: What lies beyond the last threshold, if threshold it is? Buddhists believe that the four noble truths taught by the Buddha provide an escape from the endless circle of dying and rebirth, a deliverance first experienced by the Buddha himself. After his death (or Parinibbana, meaning “all-round completion of earthly existence”), the Buddha continued to exist as what believers call “a presence in the absence.” A later Buddha, the Maitreya or Metteyya, in order to enlighten his disciples about the world to come, composed a poetic text, The Sermon of the Chronicle-To-Be, announcing “five disappearances” that will follow the death of the last Buddha: “the disappearance of attainments, the disappearance of method, the disappearance of learning, the disappearance of symbols, the disappearance of relics.” This multiple absence shall proclaim an age in which the truth will no longer be attainable by humankind. The end of all things shall see the last priest break the sacred precepts, the memory of the sacred texts fade, the vestments and attributes of the monks lose their meaning, and the destruction of all holy Buddhist relics by fire. “Then the Kappa or World-Cycle shall be annihilated,” reads this solemn document.4
For the Zoroastrians, death is a creation of the Evil Spirit, Angra Mainyu. In the beginning, the world existed in two consecutive ages of three thousand years each, first in spiritual form, then in material form, before it was attacked by the Evil Spirit, who created disease to oppose health, ugliness to beauty, death to life. Three thousand years later, sometime between 1700 and 1400 B.C.E., the prophet Zarathustra (or Zoroaster) was born in Persia, heralding the divine revelation that would allow humankind to do battle against Angra Mainyu. According to the Zoroastrian sacred book, the Zend-Avesta, the present age will last another three thousand years from the date of Zoroaster’s death, at the end of which evil will be defeated for ever. Until then, each individual death leads a step closer to that blessed hour which Zoroastrians call Frashokereti.5
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the earliest apocalyptic literature can be traced to the end of the fifth century B.C.E., when, according to the Talmud, classical Jewish prophecy came to an end with the last of the prophets, Malachi, Haggai, and Zechariah.6 But prophetic visions continued to be recorded, no longer as an individual voice, with the prophet proclaiming his own name, but anonymously or under the borrowed names of ancient sages. With the exception of the book of Daniel, the rest of this new prophetic literature came to form part of the Aggadah, the Jewish corpus of mainly Talmudic texts that deals with nonlegal topics. Classical prophetic literature described events that would result from human misconduct and would take place when time came to an end, heralding an eternal Golden Age. These cataclysms would bring about the fall of heathen kingdoms, the redemption of the chosen people, the return from their exile to the Promised Land, and the establishment of universal peace and justice. While admitting these visions, the new prophets announced a battle: not only a mortal conflict between God’s people and the unbelievers, but a vast otherworldly war between the hosts of good and those of evil. In the early biblical prophecies, the Redeemer was God himself; the newer ones announced the coming of a Messiah whose nature would be both human and divine. These later prophetic writings were to nourish, of course, the nascent beliefs of the followers of Christ.
The Old Testament taught that a relationship with God is possible only during a person’s lifetime. After death—the realm from which in the Jewish tradition language is excluded—all contact with the divine is severed. “The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence,” wrote the Psalmist (Ps. 115:17). Whatever a person could do to please God had to be accomplished on earth or not at all. But during the first century B.C.E., different, more hopeful notions began to thrive among the Jewish people. The existence of an afterlife, retribution for bad and good behavior, and the concept of the resurrection of the body (though all these, in rudimentary form, can be traced back to canonical texts) became fundamental tenets of Jewish belief. With them God’s reach was reaffirmed even after the death of the flesh, and humankind was assured an immortality that lent tremendous importance to whatever a person did in the here and now. These ancient certainties, assimilated and transformed in successive exegetical readings culminating in the Apocalypse, are at the core of Dante’s Commedia. For Dante, we, the living, are responsible for our actions and our life, on earth and beyond, and we forge our own rewards and punishments as we travel along the road of life to our certain end. They constitute the fundamental declaration of the duty of the individual-to-be. For Dante, after life we are not condemned to silence: the dead retain the gift of language so they may reflect through words on what came to pass.
Islam promises that after death there will be punishments for the miscreants and rewards for believers. “For the unbelievers We have prepared chains and fetters and a blazing Fire. But the righteous shall drink of a cup tempered at the Camphor Fountain, a gushing spring at which the servants of God will refresh themselves: they who keep their vows and dread the far-spread terrors of Judgment day; who, though they hold it dear, give sustenance to the destitute, the orphan, and the captive, saying: ‘We feed you for God’s sake only; we seek of you neither recompense nor thanks: for we fear from our Lord a day of anguish and of woe.’” This fear will prove fruitful: after the death of the body, God will reward believers with robes of silk, reclining couches, shady trees, offers of fruit, silver dishes, and cups of ginger-flavored water served by eternally young boys sparkling like sprinkled pearls. In the twelfth century, Ibn ‘Arabi explained that the condemned “shall be gathered in such ugly forms that apes and swine would look better.” The accumulation of wealth is an obstacle to eternal bliss: according to the Prophet’s companion, Abu Huraryra, the Prophet said that believers who are poor will enter Paradise half a day before the rich.7
The Day of Resurrection, or Al-yawm al-qiyama (also called Al-yawm al-fasal, or Day of Sorting Out, and Al-yawm al-din, or Day of Religion), in which humankind shall bear witness against itself, is mentioned more specifically in sura 75 of the Qur’an. “On that day there shall be joyful faces, looking towards their Lord. On that day there shall be mournful faces, dreading some great affliction.” The exact date of that awful event is not given (it is known only to God, and even the Prophet cannot change it), but on that day the dead will be resurrected, “whether you turn to stone or iron, or any other substance you may think unlikely to be given life.” The Day of Resurrection will be announced by a number of major signs: the appearance of Masih ad-Dajjal, the false messiah; the desertion of Medina; the return of Isa (Christ in Islamic nomenclature), who will defeat Masih ad-Dajjal and all false religions; the release of the tribes of Gog and Magog; the assault on Mecca and the destruction of the Kaaba; and the death of all true believers caused by a sweet southern breeze. At this time all the verses of the Qur’an will be forgotten, all knowledge of Islam will fall into oblivion, a demonic beast will emerge to address the survivors, who will take part in a frenzied sexual debauch, a vast black cloud will cover the earth, the sun will rise in the west, and the angel Israfil will sound the first trumpet, causing the death of all living creatures. Finally, the second trumpet will sound, and the dead will be resurrected.8
The Spanish scholar Miguel Asín Palacios argued that Islamic eschatology may have been known to Dante through Latin translations of the hadith made in Córdoba. Though Asín Palacios’s theories regarding Islamic influences in the Commedia have been largely discredited, his critics have been forced to accept the possibility of “an intrusion of Islamic themes in medieval Christian religious thought.” Once suggested, Asín Palacios’s basic argument appears obvious: that from Al-Andalus (a civilization which fostered a fluid dialogue between the three cultures of Spain: Islamic, Christian, and Jewish) the Islamic texts, translated into Latin, could easily have traveled to the cultural centers of Italy, where they would have certainly attracted the attention of an omnivorous reader such as Dante. Notable among these texts is the Epistle of Forgiveness, a satirical excursion through heaven and hell written by the eleventh-century Syrian poet Abu l-’Ala’ al-Ma’arri, which irresistibly evokes for a Western reader the conversational Otherworld of Dante’s Commedia. In the Epistle, the author makes fun of an obscure and pedantic grammarian of his acquaintance, who, after death, having overcome the difficulties of otherworldly bureaucracy, engages in a dialogue with famous poets, philosophers, and heretics from the past, and even speaks with the devil himself.9
Distinguishing the “second death” from the first, Islamic authors have argued that dying is the crowning, positive act of a true believer’s life. A collection of writings from the tenth century penned by the anonymous members of an esoteric fraternity based in Basra and Baghdad known as the Ikhwan al-Safa, or Brethren of Purity or Sincerity, contains a text called “Why We Die” that describes the act of dying through a series of extended metaphors. The body is a ship, the world the sea, death the coast we are headed for; the world is a racecourse, the body a noble horse, death the goal where God is the king who gives out the prizes; the world is a plantation, life is the succession of the seasons, the hereafter is the threshing floor that separates the grain from the chaff. “Therefore,” reads the text, “death is a wise thing, a mercy, and a blessing, since we can only arrive at our Lord after we have left this physical structure and have departed from our bodies.”10
No doubt the Islamic Day of Resurrection shares certain features of its Christian counterpart. According to Iranaeus, a leader of the Christian church in the second century, John of Patmos was granted his vision in the last years of the reign of Domitian, 95 or 96. Traditionally (and erroneously), John of Patmos is identified as John the Evangelist, Jesus’s beloved disciple, who in his old age, it was supposed, retired to Patmos’s rocky wilderness to put his vision into words.11
John’s Apocalypse is a haunting, mysteriously poetic text that portrays death not as the end but as a stage in the struggle between good and evil. It is structured around the numinous number seven: seven letters, seven seals, seven trumpets, seven visions, seven vials, and finally seven more visions. To the anguished question “What is to become of us?” John’s book responded with a wealth of terrible images of “things that must shortly come to pass” (Rev. 1:1) and enticed readers to decipher them. The mysteries of revelation were depicted as closed book secured with seven seals, the promise of understanding as an open book that the Angel gives John to eat, mirroring a metaphor from the book of Ezekiel (2:10), in which the prophet is also given a book “written within and without: and there was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe.” Thus the vision granted by God was both unintelligible (sealed) to the unbeliever and intelligible (ingestable) by those who believed. This is one of the oldest and most enduring images of the act of reading: devouring the text in order to apprehend it, making it part of one’s own body.
The earliest known Latin interpretation of the Apocalypse was written in the fourth century by Victorinus, bishop of Pettau, in Styria (now Austria), who was martyred under the emperor Diocletian. Victorinus composed commentaries on the Bible, of which none survives except fragments of his readings of the first and last books, Genesis and the Apocalypse. Believing that the persecution suffered by the Christians was proof that the end of the world was approaching, Victorinus saw in John’s Apocalypse the announcement of contemporary events that were to culminate (he thought) a thousand years after the beginning of Christ’s reign.12
An illuminated fifteenth-century manuscript of the Apocalypse depicting (top) the Beast and Dragon and (bottom) Worship of the Beast and Dragon. (The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS M.0524, fol. 10v, 1. Photograph © The Pierpont Morgan Library/Art Resource, NY.)
Victorinus’s reading proved convincing. Long after the year 1000, readers continued to interpret John’s vision as a chronicle of present history. As late as 1593, John Napier, a Scottish mathematician who invented the decimal point and the logarithm, published A Pleine Discoverie of the Whole Revelation of St. John that echoed Victorinus’s commentaries. Fiercely anti-Catholic, Napier developed in this book a timeline based on his reading of the Apocalypse. Using the defeat of the Spanish Armada as proof that God sided with the Protestant cause, he explained that the seventh and last age of history had started with a blast of the final trumpet in 1541, the year John Knox began the Scottish Reformation, and would end, according to his calculations, in the year 1786. Modern-day inheritors of these tidy readings are American evangelical revivalists such as Billy Graham who see in John’s vision the threat or promise of Armageddon.13
But in the fourth century, Victorinus’s historical reading of the Apocalypse was not found acceptable by the ecclesiastical authorities, especially in light of the growing power of the church after Constantine. The commentaries of Saint Jerome on the commentaries of Victorinus, though granting the martyred scholar a distinguished place among ecclesiastical writers, suggested that his interpretation was misguided and the Apocalypse required an allegorical, not a literal reading. Ingeniously, Jerome found a solution that embraced Victorinus’s ideas but did not negate the present existence of the church triumphant. Jerome suggested that the Apocalypse presented a series of typological events that recurred throughout history, periodically reminding us that the Day of Judgment is nigh: the trumpets that began sounding in Babylon are sounding yet today. The second death still awaits us.14
In The City of God, Saint Augustine seems to agree with Jerome’s inclusionary interpretation. The Apocalypse, according to Augustine, reveals to its intended readers the history of the true church, and also their own personal conflicts, by means of a series of images that might seem baffling to some but that, read in the light of certain clarifying passages, speak to each reader of a private struggle to overcome the darkness and go towards the light. Augustine is severely critical of those who believe that the end of the thousand-year kingdom announces a bodily resurrection in order to enjoy “most unrestrained material feasts.” This first resurrection, Augustine says, will enable those to whom it is granted “not only [to come] to life again from the death of sin, but [to continue] in this new condition of new life.” Augustine concludes: “This coming to life again would have made them sharers in the first resurrection; and then the second death would have had no power over them.”15 Dante’s emergence from the dark forest and his pilgrimage to the final vision follows Augustine’s reading.
Nourished by these commentaries, medieval Christian eschatologists assumed that death is not the end: there is an afterlife of the souls. But even that is not the final stage of being. The ultimate moment will come when the last trumpets are sounded and, in one final ordering, the souls will know the true conclusion to their stories. In expectation of a just retribution, true Christians were supposed to face their last moments with ritual equanimity, quietly trusting their soul to their Maker, the Aristotelian Supreme Good to whom all things must return.
According to the historian Philippe Ariès, this meek attitude towards death can be traced to the end of the first millennium. Christian Europe conceived death as “domesticated”—that is to say, controlled by a system of rituals that allowed the dying person to be the conscious protagonist of his or her last moment.16 The agonizing person was supposed to await death with active resignation, placing the body in a preordained position, lying on the back with the face turned towards heaven, and accepting his or her participation in conventional ceremonies that transformed the death chamber into a public space.
Death came to be understood as a consolation, a hopeful notion that prevailed until perhaps the skepticism of the Enlightenment; it was seen as a safe haven, a final resting place from the toils of life on earth. To the Islamic images of death as the longed-for harbor, the threshing floor after harvest, the finish line of a race, the Christian imagination added that of the inn, waiting at the end of life’s journey. “Mad, my lady, is the traveler who annoyed by the day’s fatigues wants to go back to the beginning of the journey and return to the same place,” we read in La Celestina, “for all those things in life that we possess, it is better to possess them than to expect them, because nearer is the end when we have more advanced from the beginning. There is nothing sweeter or more pleasant to the weary man than an inn. So it is that, although youth be merry, the truly wise old man does not wish for it, because he who lacks reason and good sense loves almost nothing else but what he has lost.”17
The end of the first millennium, according to Ariès, marked yet another change in our dealings with death: the acceptance of the dead within the realm of the living. In ancient Rome, civic law forbade the burial in urbe, within the city walls. This convention changed, says Ariès, not because of a reconsideration of European rituals but through the North African custom of venerating the remains of martyrs and burying them in churches, first on the outskirts of the city and then wherever the church stood.18 Church and graveyard became one and the same place, and part of the neighborhood of the living.
With the incorporation of the dead into the world of those still alive, the ritual of dying took on a double sense: an “acting out” of death, the performance of a first-person-singular Day of Judgment concluding with the end of “I,” and a witnessing of that act by those who remain alive, who acquire the duty of mourning and of memory, and shift the paraphernalia of death into the realm of the erotic, as, for example, in the art and literature of the Romantic movement. Death acquired a gothic beauty. Edgar Allan Poe judged the death of a beautiful woman “unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”19
The industrialized societies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries tend to exclude death. Death in our time occurs in hospitals and nursing homes, far from the domestic or public eye. Death “becomes shameful and forbidden,” argues Ariès, hiding even from the patient the proximity of the final moment. And modern war, up to a point, deprives death of its singularity. The two world wars and the slaughters they engendered that continue up to this day made death plural, swallowing up each individual death in interminable statistics and conglomerate memorials. It was to this erasure by numbers that Christopher Isherwood referred when speaking to a young Jewish movie producer. Isherwood had mentioned that six hundred thousand homosexuals were killed in the Nazi concentration camps. The young man was not impressed. “But Hitler killed six million Jews,” he said sternly. Isherwood looked back at him and asked: “What are you? In real estate?”20
In spite of dying offstage, in spite of dying anonymously or as part of a multitude, in spite of the possibility of consolation and the assurance of closure, it seems that we still don’t want to die absolutely. In 2002, Jeremy Webb, editor of the New Scientist, offered a prize to its readers: after the death of the winner, his or her body would be prepared and slowly cooled to an astonishingly low temperature at the Cryonics Institute of Michigan, where it would be held indefinitely in liquid nitrogen. “Though sperm, embryos, viruses and bacteria have been frozen and then returned to life, large volumes of flesh and bone and brain and blood present more of a challenge. There is no decay process, no biological action below –196° C,” explained Webb. “The whole emphasis of cryonics is that you put yourself into deep freeze until technology has gained the expertise to bring you back.”21
The questions “What is to become of us?” “Do we disappear forever?” “Can we return from the grave?” imply many different conceptions of death. Whether we conceive death as the last chapter or imagine it as the beginning of a second volume, whether we fear it because we can’t know it or believe that beyond it lies retribution for our conduct on earth, whether we become prematurely nostalgic at the thought of no longer existing or empathize with those whom we’ll leave behind, our picture of death as a state of being (or not being) determines our notion of death as an act, final or perambulatory. “Even if I am mistaken in my belief that the soul is immortal,” wrote Cicero in the first century B.C.E. with unusual simplicity, “I make the mistake gladly, for the belief makes me happy, and is one which as long as I live I want to retain.”22
Beyond the impossible realization of our own death, as we grow older we are made persistently aware of the increasing absence of others. We find it hard to say good-bye. Every farewell haunts us with the secret suspicion that this might be the last; we try to remain waving at the door for as long as possible. We don’t resign ourselves to definitive absences. We don’t want to believe in the absolute power of dissolution. This incredulity is a consolation to believers. When Saint Bernard prays to the Virgin for Dante’s salvation, he asks her to “scatter for him every cloud of his mortality with your prayers, / so that joy supreme may unfold for him.”23
Seneca (whom Dante certainly read but merely acknowledged with a single epithet, “moral Seneca,” in the Noble Castle of Limbo) had studied the Greek Stoics but did not follow in his own life their excellent advice. In his writings, however, he notes with stoic sobriety that death must not frighten us: “It is not that we have so little time,” he writes in banker’s terms to his friend Paulinus, supervisor of Rome’s grain supply, “but that we lose so much. Life is long enough and our allotted portion generous enough for our most ambitious projects if we invest it all carefully.”24 These ideas, of course, were not new in the Rome of the first century C.E. Since the earliest times, the Romans had conceived of an afterlife conditioned by how well (or how badly) we had administered this one.
The idea that there is a sequel to this life, a continuum, an ingrained immortality, is beautifully summed up in an inscription collected in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, the great collection of Latin epitaphs: “I am ashes, ashes are earth, the earth is a goddess, therefore I am not dead.”25 Religious dogmas, civil legislations, aesthetics and ethics, philosophies highbrow and low, mysticism: everything relies on this limpid syllogism.
If the dead do not vanish utterly, then it might be convenient to maintain with them some sort of a relationship: a chance to speak with them and, above all, an opportunity for them to speak, as they do in the Commedia. The earliest literary examples of such dialogues can be seen in ancient tombstones inscribed with words attributed to the dead, like the ones mentioned by Dante after entering the infernal City of Dis.26 Among the oldest tombs in the Italian landscape were those built by the Etruscans, elegantly decorated with festive funeral scenes and portraits of the departed. The Romans continued the customs of the vanished Etruscan civilization by adding inscriptions to their tombstones. At first these merely either announced the name of the dead, praised the departed with sober words, and wished his or her souls a painless voyage to the next (“May the earth be light on you!”) or politely addressed passing strangers (“Greetings, you who go by!”). Though brevity continued to be a feature of epitaphs, with time these became less conventional, more lyrical, simulating a conversation with the absent friend or relative, or establishing a link of common mortality between the dead and those still living. And yet, translated into words, the most heartfelt sentiments and the deepest sorrow can become artificial. In the end, the epitaph became a literary genre, the elegy’s younger brother.
In the first chapter of Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Contini, a group of people visit an Etruscan cemetery north of Rome. A young girl asks her father why it is that tombs that are ancient make us less sad than more recent graves. “That is easily understood,” says the father. “Those who have died recently are nearer to us, and precisely for that reason we love them more. While the Etruscans, they have been dead for so long that it is as if they never had lived, as if they had been dead forever.”27
Whether near to us or far removed in time, the dead arouse our curiosity because we know that, sooner or later, we will join them. We want to know how things begin, but we also want to know how they will end. We try to imagine the world without us, in a disturbing effort to conceive a story without a narrator, a scene without a witness. Dante ingeniously inverted the procedure: he imagined the world not without him but without the others, or, rather, with him alive and all the others dead. He granted himself the power to explore death from the point of view of the living, wandering among those for whom the final question has been dreadfully or joyously answered.
The Commedia is a poem with no end. Its conclusion is also its beginning, since it is only after the final vision, when Dante at last sees the ineffable, that the poet can begin to tell the chronicle of the journey. Borges, shortly before his death in Geneva in 1986, conceived a short story (which he did not have a chance to write) about Dante in Venice, dreaming of a sequel to the Commedia. Borges never explained what that sequel might have been, but perhaps in that second volume of his pilgrimage, Dante would have returned to earth to die and, as if in a mirror of his masterpiece, his soul would have roamed the world of flesh and blood engaging his contemporaries in conversation. After all, in his weary exile, he must have felt as exiles do, like a ghost among the living.
