I do not fear death, I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
Mark Twain (1835–1910), writer
Where will you live after death? I will live where the unborn live.
Seneca (c.4 BC–AD 65), The Trojan Women
Death, the final boundary between things.
Horace (65–8 BC), Roman poet
A rapture of repose.
Lord Byron (1788–1824), poet
When you are dead, replied Fernando Pessoa, you know everything, that’s one of the advantages.
José Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
1 | For Aristotle the laws of nature describe a universe striving towards perfection. Evolutionists are happier with the idea of perfectibility than of absolute perfection. Evolution may go backwards and forwards, but in the long run it does tend to make things better. Better, not optimal. Darwin believed ‘that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he is now’, by which he presumably meant still far from perfect, but more perfect. Philosophers like Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) believed that evolution was leading humanity toward some understanding of its unity with all of creation. This is a noble thought I wish I could share. On those days when I stand ‘facing straight into the strong keen wind of understanding’ I am all too aware how that sentence of Darwin’s ends. Even these more perfect creatures, and indeed all sentient beings, are eventually ‘doomed to complete annihilation’. Everything is doomed to die, even the universe. Life is profligate, but it is death that drives evolution. In the far distant future, not only will there no longer be any plants, kangaroos, insects or us; the material of the universe will have spread so far apart that the universe itself will die of the cold.
2 | In ancient Egypt, death was on the other side of a door. The afterworld was much like this world, but with fantastical elements like walls of iron and trees of turquoise. Barley grew taller there, but not by much. In ancient Greece the afterworld was a dull place of mild torment, of shades wandering about morosely. Discovered in the 1970s in tombs in southern Italy are paintings of handsome naked youths diving into the air, said to represent the soul as it plunges into death.
3 | She died some 3,300 years ago. She was no more than eighteen years old, a slender-waisted girl about five feet three inches tall, with fair, rather short hair. She was buried on a summer’s day. A small yarrow flower was laid on the rim of the coffin before the lid was fixed in place. She wore a short blouse and a belted, knee-length cord skirt. The belt buckle is of bronze and decorated with spirals. A comb made of horn hung on her belt. She wore two bronze arm rings and had a thin ring through her ear. Next to her head is a box made of bark containing a bronze awl and a hairnet. By her feet there is a small bucket also made of bark that once contained a mixture of beer and wine made from wheat and cranberries sweetened with honey. In a cloth bundle by her side are the cremated remains of a child aged about five or six. It seems unlikely, given her age, that the child could have been hers. Perhaps the child was a sibling who died at the same time. We do not know the young woman’s name, but today she is known as the Egtved Girl. The younger child has no name.
(An elaboration of a label in a museum in Copenhagen.)
Whenever I see a dead body, death seems to me a departure. The corpse looks to me like a suit that was left behind. Someone went away and didn’t need to take the one and only outfit he’d worn.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
The lonely shepherd’s answer to the question what he and his family did without a doctor – ‘We just dies a nat’ral death.’
Eleanor G. Hayden (1865–1964), travel writer
I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space traveller’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment; death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.
Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin
4 | Consciousness dims from states of wakefulness into states of death. There is cardiac death, cardiopulmonary death, apparent death, somatic death, brain-stem death, whole-brain death, legal death.
If the world is rationally constructed and has meaning, then there must be such a thing.
Kurt Gödel, on his belief in an afterlife
Nirvana is nothing.
Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011), journalist and author
I think it’s a bit like the whole dance of Shiva thing, that you think you’re an aloof spectator watching the universe, but actually you’re just part of the cosmic ebb and flow of the world. If you think you’re part of the ebb and flow of the cosmos, and there’s no separate little soul, inspecting the world, that’s going to be extinguished – then it’s ennobling. You’re part of this grand scheme of things.
V.S. Ramachandran
I don’t think I need to be at one with the universe.
Richard Gregory (1923–2010), neuropsychologist
And there, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, I slipped a gear, or something like that. There was not me and the landscape, but a kind of oneness: a connection as though my skin had been blown off. More than that – as though the molecules and atoms I am made of had reunited themselves with the molecules and atoms that the rest of the world is made of. I felt absolutely connected to everything. It was very brief, but it was a total moment.
Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence
There was no longer man and boat, but a man-boat, a boat-man.
Bernard Moitessier (1925–94), yachtsman
Tantra concerned itself with the totality of existence, the apprehension of the whole universe within man’s being … Tantra might be interpreted as the practice of mankind’s earliest religious intuition: that body, mind and nature are all one.
Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard
Up the coast a few miles north, in a lava reef under the cliffs, there are a lot of rock pools. You can visit them when the tide is out. Each pool is separate and different, and you can, if you are fanciful, give them names, such as George, Charlotte, Kenny, Mrs. Strunk. Just as George and the others are thought of, for convenience, as individual entities, so you may think of a rock pool as an entity; though, of course, it is not. The waters of its consciousness – so to speak – are swarming with hunted anxieties, grim-jawed greeds, dartingly vivid intuitions, old crusty-shelled rock-gripping obstinacies, deep-down sparkling undiscovered secrets, ominous protean organisms motioning mysteriously, perhaps warningly, toward the surface light. How can such a variety of creatures co-exist at all? Because they have to. The rocks of the pool hold their world together. And, throughout the day of the ebb tide, they know no other.
But that long day ends at last; yields to the night-time of the flood. And, just as the waters of the ocean come flooding, darkening over the pools, so over George and the others in sleep come the waters of that other ocean; that consciousness which is no one in particular but which contains everyone and everything, past, present, and future, and extends unbroken beyond the uttermost stars. We may surely suppose that, in the darkness of the full flood, some of these creatures are lifted from their pools to drift far out over the deep waters. But do they ever bring back, when the daytime of the ebb returns, any kind of catch with them? Can they tell us, in any manner, about their journey? Is there, indeed, anything for them to tell – except that the waters of the ocean are not really other than the waters of the pool?
Christopher Isherwood (1904–86), A Single Man
5 | No longer a drop of water but the ocean. The Sufi poet Rumi (1207–73) described life as being like a boat slowly filling up with water. When full, the boat simply falls away and we become one with the limitless ocean. Such descriptions do not make me feel any more at ease with the idea of death, but they do help me prize life. To be at one with the universe is all very well, but it isn’t this. Whatever death is and whatever may come afterwards, death is a separation, even if it turns out, paradoxically, to be an end to separation. That it is a paradox is no comfort.
6 | If death is an expansion into everything, then death is nothing at all. If I could escape my ego and put my faith in the world of atoms, I might see that there is no death. Nothing is destroyed in the material world. There are just processes changing energy from one form into other forms. We are ghosts who have failed to account for our existence in the material world. It is hardly surprising that we have also failed to account for our non-existence.
‘Who would want to be at one with a stone?’ I used to think, dismissively, of Buddhism. Now I sometimes wonder, what could it mean not to be at one with the universe? If separation as a thing were possible even for a moment, the separation must exist forever. The world is of a piece. The glass on the table is only as separate as we wish it to be. Look at the glass closely and we rush back through aeons of time and find ourselves at one with the glass, a patch of energy ready to expand at the Big Bang.
No, there is no comfort here either. I cannot escape my ego. I believe in the world of things. It is where I live.
7 | Why not?, the Buddhist monk said to me in reply to my assertion that whatever came afterwards it could not be this. I think I know what he meant: that I had fallen into a dualist trap of my own devising. If the world is not divided into ‘this’ and ‘that’ – if the separation between the rock and the table is at bottom an illusion – how then can I claim to know that the ‘that’ of death is different from the ‘this’ of life?
I think of Slaughterhouse-Five,1 of Billy Pilgrim who slips the egoistic bonds of time and finds past and future laid out eternally existent, the universe as Einstein understood it to be. He escapes the single track of the trammelled ego that runs from birth to death only ever moving forwards. Is this what death is: an ego let loose? A self revisiting the moments of a life, and building them up, eternally, like chords in a symphony? Might Hell be the regret for not having made more or better moments to choose from? Or perhaps Hell is the desire to have had different end-stops: if only I had been born a little earlier, died a little later; and Heaven is making do with what there is, what there was. That this. It’s a story, anyway, and what choice is there – so long as we live – but to tell the best stories we can?
8 | And yet, although I would like to believe that time is an illusion as physics currently has it, I suspect that time is for the living. Time is real. The universe evolves in time. Everything is as real as everything else, at every scale. Each moment exists and every one of them offers the possibility that something entirely new that has never happened in the universe before might happen now. We live in order to experience change, and death is an end to that. No more moments. In death I will become a function of other people’s thoughts, a poor substitute indeed for being alive. She will never be forgotten, they said at the funeral. They will never be forgotten, they say of the slain. They lie. Forgetting is what we are good at. Farewell to this life forever. I expect death will be much as it was before birth, and I have forgotten what that was like.
9 | The family gathers around the hospital bed; witnesses. There is a sense of suppressed excitement in the air that no one acknowledges. A man is about to die.
And here it comes, the conjuring trick much anticipated, that moment in time when their father leaves the room without leaving his bed; in his stead a puppet-replica, a piece of perfectly articulated machinery – what was living flesh still miraculous even in its mechanical reduction.
Grief hits the witnesses as hard as a punch from a boxer. Invisible forces beyond the reach of the ego contort them, as if they were trees grown long years on some blasted heath.
The once biological body of their father gives itself over to physics and chemistry. The body sighs its last sighs, a shocking hint of reanimation that is merely gases readjusting, as they must, between un-living barriers.
The time comes, as it must, when the body is taken away; the shape of a father, husband, grandfather, cut out of the world; reduced now to the outline of zipped plastic. The family leaves to live on.
But in the night there is a stirring. The flesh reanimates itself, and what was dispatched comes back. Sometimes, simply, there are flickerings – beyond the sensitivities of our best machines, even in the draughty corridors of death, in the ashes of its fire – which catch and flame back into life. The grandfather, father, husband returns, as if he had merely changed his mind.
He tells a story – the usual one – of a tunnel and bright light, of the bliss of extinction. I was headed one way, he says, and wouldn’t have turned my head, except that faintly I heard the voices of those I had left behind. Who? Who? Which of us?, his family ask. That’s the strangest thing. I heard each of you distinctly, and yet I knew that in some way it was the call of everyone I had ever known, perhaps even the call of everyone and everything there has ever been. I loved the grass and everything equally, he says. I knew you, recognised you, loved each and every one of you.
A shadow of apprehension fell on the family. They felt insulted, generalised. In the years to come, no matter how he tried to explain, they would not, could not understand. He became depressed and is family became first puzzled and then angry, and puzzled at heir anger and so angrier. Both sides – and that was how it was, like being on opposite sides – felt let down. His family had suffered the embarrassment of getting what they thought they had wanted; until the day he died again, they never quite forgave him for coming back. Is that why the dead ignore the living, because the worlds are too different?
10 | Oliver Lodge (1851–1940), an English physicist, left a secret message hidden within seven envelopes, one inside the other. He said that in death he would try to tell four famous mediums, instructed to assemble for the purpose, what the secret message said. He died, the Oliver Lodge Posthumous Test Committee convened, the four mediums were quizzed. After a while the mediums refused to answer any more questions and walked off stage.
11 | On his way to the guillotine, the French chemist and nobleman Antoine Lavoisier (1743–94) told his assistant he would perform one last experiment: he would attempt to blink after his head had been severed. The assistant was instructed to count how many times.
When I die and go to heaven, there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is quantum electrodynamics and the other is the turbulent motion of fluids. And about the former I am really optimistic.
Attributed to the mathematician Horace Lamb (1849–1934) on his deathbed; also attributed to the physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901–76) on his
Why the owl? Why the newt? Why snow on a Douglas fir? Why the river? Why the sound of the river – from far away, from up close? Why the sky for birds to fly through, to fall through? Why the stars so far away? Why loneliness? Why happiness? Why emptiness that won’t be filled but so easily fills me? Why the red rust of the garden gate? Why the tree with the hole in it? Why tiny orange lichens?
Steve Edwards, Breaking Into the Back Country
12 | The scientist, as he takes his last breath, smiles to himself. ‘I was right, there is nothing. But what a nothing!’