In France, Le Magazine Littéraire has devoted its November issue to “what literature knows about death.” I looked at a number of articles with interest, but was disappointed to find that, apart from some things I didn’t know, they were in the end restating a familiar concept: that literature has always been preoccupied with death—along, of course, with love. The articles deal eloquently with the presence of death in twentieth-century narrative as well as in pre-Romantic Gothic literature. But they could just as easily have described the death of Hector, or the grief of Andromache, or the suffering of martyrs in many medieval texts. To say nothing of the history of philosophy, which begins with the most common example of a major premise in a syllogism: “All men are mortal.”
But I think the problem lies elsewhere, and perhaps has to do with the simple fact that people today read fewer books. We have become incapable of dealing with death. Religions, myths, and ancient rituals made us familiar with death, however daunting it remained. We became familiar with it through funeral celebrations, the wailing of mourners, the great requiem masses. We were prepared for death by sermons on hell, and while still a child I was encouraged to read pages on death from The Companion of Youth by Don Bosco, who was not only a jolly priest who encouraged children to play, but had a fiery and visionary imagination. He reminded us that we cannot know where death will surprise us—whether in our bed, at work, in the street, through a burst vein, catarrh, a rush of blood, a fever, a sore, an earthquake, a thunderbolt, “perhaps just as you finish reading this consideration.” At that moment we will feel our head darken, our eyes fill with pain, our tongue burn, jaws closed, chest heavy, blood chilled, flesh consumed, heart pierced. From here comes the need to practice the Exercise for a Good Death: “When my motionless feet warn me that my career in this world is about to end . . . When my numb and tremulous hands can no longer grasp you, my blessed Crucifix, and against my will I let you fall onto the bed of my suffering . . . When my eyes, dimmed and stricken with horror at imminent death . . . When my cold and trembling glances . . . When my pale and leaden cheeks inspire compassion and terror in those around me, and my hair soaked with the sweat of death, rising up on my head announce that my end is near . . . When my imagination, agitated by terrible and fearsome ghosts is immersed in mortal sorrow . . . When I lose the use of all senses . . . merciful Jesus, have pity on me.”
Pure sadism, it might be said. But what do we teach our young people today? That death takes place far away from us in a hospital, that people usually don’t walk behind the coffin to the cemetery, that we no longer see the dead. We no longer see them? We see them constantly blown up, crashed on the sidewalk, dropped into the sea with their feet in a cube of cement, their heads left rolling on the cobbles, their brains splattered over the windows of taxis. But they are not us, and they are not our loved ones; they are actors. Death is entertainment, even when the media reports about the girl actually raped or the victim of a serial killer. We don’t see the mutilated body that would remind us of death. The news bulletins let us see grieving friends who bring flowers to the scene of the crime or, far worse sadism, reporters ring the mother’s doorbell and ask, “What did you feel when they killed your daughter?” Rather than death, they show us friendship and maternal grief, which affect us less violently.
And so the disappearance of death from our immediate experience will terrify us more when the moment approaches—the event that is part of us from birth, and to which every wise person grows accustomed throughout life.
2012