Lovers of me, bafflers of graves.
In the first centuries of the Roman Empire, you took your chances being a Christian. Occasionally, some far-flung Roman prefect would rouse himself long enough to bully you or one of your brethren, which could mean anything from exile to, more grandiosely, an appointment with the lions.
In the early years of the third century, a Christian theologian, Tertullian, sought to win religious tolerance from the Roman Empire for his persecuted fellow Christians. In Apologeticus, Tertullian explains that though Christians respected the emperor—at the time, the unusually brutal Septimius Severus—they could not worship him since he was no god, let alone the God. Tertullian then offered some legalistic reasoning about why this should not bother any right-thinking emperor, why, in fact, an emperor should prefer to be thought of as a man and not a god. Only men, Tertullian observes, could be emperors. “To call him god,” Tertullian suggests, somewhat snidely, “is to rob him of his title. If he is not a man, emperor he cannot be.” Tertullian implies that this argument should not come as news to an emperor; he knows in his heart that he is a man and not a god. Tertullian writes: “Even when, amid the honors of a triumph, he sits on that lofty chair, he is reminded that he is only human. A voice at his back keeps whispering in his ear, ‘Look behind thee. Remember thou art but a man.’”1
East River ferryboat
Tertullian’s description of the emperor’s “voice at his back” may be the source for the belief that during “triumphs,” the lavish ceremonies held to celebrate Roman military victories, a slave would follow behind the returned conquering emperor and whisper in his ear, “Respice te, hominem te memento”: Remember, you are only a man. Or, more simply, the slave is supposed to have whispered, “Memento mori”: Remember, you die.2
In all likelihood, there was no whispering slave. The evidence for it beyond Tertullian’s account is slim, and Tertullian seems to be describing what an emperor must be thinking to himself, not what someone is actually whispering to him. But the image makes an impression nonetheless. Here is no inert skull, the usual reminder of death that later Christians (and Christian painters) would favor, but a living, breathing memento mori. Someone whose job it is to remind you that, at the height of your triumphs, you die.
Triumphant emperors may have needed such a reminder. I do not. Indeed, a slave would be wasting his breath on me, because I think about death, including my own, daily, even more so as I cross the midway of my life’s journey, as Dante put it, and even more so since my wife and I had a daughter a few years ago. As with household chores, my wife and I share the burden of worrying about death. I worry about what would happen if I die; she worries about what would happen if she dies; we each worry about what would happen if the other dies, or what would happen to our daughter if we both die; and, though this is harder to fathom, we try to imagine what would happen (as recently happened to two different acquaintances of ours) if our child should die. In short, we need no one to remind us that we die. We are doing just fine on our own.
Unlike Tertullian, though, we are not Christians. I am not anything, in fact, except an ordinary atheist. As a result, I remember that I die to slightly different effect than do most Christians. For Christians, a memento mori does not just remind you of your mortality but, rather, of which world—this one or the next—you should hold dear. The Ash Wednesday invocation, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” and the command that usually follows, “Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel,” offer a similar reminder. Forget your body, which dies, and forget the earth, through which you’re merely passing. Rather, focus on your soul, which lives on, in heaven or hell, depending on whether you turn toward or away from God.
View of Brooklyn from the foot of Wall Street, 1855
Like a lot of people, I do not believe in a soul distinct from a body, nor in heaven or hell, and I think this world, this life, is the only one we have. So when I think about death, I am reminded that, sad to say, this body, this world, is it. For some, that thought might lead them to follow other Latin maxims, whether carpe diem or, as Horace put it, nunc est bibendum (now is the time to drink). For me, the thought of my own death just leads to simmering despair and, quite frankly, nauseating fear. I confess that my imagination can get carried away. On my deathbed, I wonder, what will be the last thought that passes through my mind? Whose face will be the last one that flashes on my consciousness? What will I regret? And then what? The “total emptiness forever,” as another poet, Philip Larkin, put it.
. . . no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.3
Because of these appalling prospects, though I might often think of my death, at the same time I tend not to linger over it for very long. It is simply too horrifying to contemplate. When you die, you will no longer be. The light will go out, and the darkness will overwhelm you. Everything shall become nothing. The total emptiness forever. It seems so terribly cruel: to be given life only to have every last speck of it taken away.
Who wants that drink now?
Walt Whitman is remembered as a poet of many things: the city, democracy, the human body, sex, even the Civil War. Few remember him as a poet of death. That is a mistake. In many ways, death is his great theme, though he treats it unlike any poet then or since.
That was why I found myself, one overcast June morning, aboard the East River Ferry. The East River, with its view of Manhattan to the west and Brooklyn to the east, provided Whitman with the scene for his great poem about transcendence and immortality, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” I dragged myself to Brooklyn and boarded the ferry because I wanted to live where Whitman lived, see what Whitman saw, and feel what he felt—or what remained of it. Not just because I wanted to know Whitman better, or bask in the aura, though there is something to that, but because in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” Whitman suggests that if you could see what he sees and experience what he experiences, these shared visions and experiences would reveal the hidden scheme of the universe. More important still, he promises that they would reveal how each of us, both our living and our dying, fits into that scheme. “To die is different than anyone supposed, and luckier,” Whitman writes in “Song of Myself,” from 1855, and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” from 1856, comes about as close as Whitman ever comes to showing why death is different—and luckier—than everyone supposes.4 And though I cannot, finally, accept Whitman’s comforting thoughts about death, his other reflections on the nature of the universe, especially its indifference to property, can make us feel better—less fearful and, possibly, less angry—about dying.
In the 1850s, the ferry from Brooklyn to Manhattan across the East River meant almost everything to Whitman. An aficionado of opera, the theater, and the chaotic city life of Manhattan, Whitman in the afternoons often left Brooklyn, where he then lived, and traveled by the Fulton Ferry across the East River to Manhattan. In later years, he would recall his “passion for ferries.” “My life,” he noted of this time, “was curiously identified with Fulton Ferry, already becoming the greatest of its sort in the world for general importance, volume, variety, rapidity, and picturesqueness.” He recalled that “almost daily, I cross’d on the boats.” On board, Whitman befriended the boat pilots. “The Balsirs, Johnny Cole, Ira Smith, William White, and my young ferry friend, Tom Gere—how well I remember them well,” he wrote in 1882.5
In 1883, however, not long after Whitman fondly recalled his friends the boat pilots, the Fulton Ferry was being made all but obsolete by the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. Symbolically, the bridge towered above the Fulton Street landing in Brooklyn. Increasingly anachronistic, the ferry would stop service altogether in 1924. In June 2011, just in time for me to retrace Whitman’s journey, New York Waterway, a private company, partnered with the city to restart ferry service across the East River, and riders today take the exact route Whitman did in the 1850s.6
The ferry may travel the same route Whitman did in the 1850s, but it surveys a far different scene. In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Whitman lovingly catalogues the visions that dazzled him as he chugged across the East River. “I too many and many a time crossed the river of old,” Whitman writes, and
Look’d toward the lower bay to notice the vessels arriving,
Saw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me,
Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships at anchor,
The sailors at work in the rigging or astride the spars,
The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender serpentine pennants,
The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilot-houses,
The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels,
The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sunset,
The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolicsome crests and glistening,
The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the granite storehouses by the docks,
On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flank’d on each side by the barges, the hay-boat, the belated lighter,
On the neighboring shore, the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night,
Casting their flicker of black contrasted with wild red and yellow light over the roof tops of houses, and down into the clefts of the street.7
Today, by contrast, you see far less. Most of the ships are gone, and the sailors, too. From the deck of the ferry, if you look toward the lower bay, as Whitman did, to the south and southwest, down the Brooklyn coastline, you see cars along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the barren docks and the spires of cranes of the Red Hook Container Terminal. In the bay itself, perhaps the most notable sight is the ventilation building on Governor’s Island that serves the Brooklyn–Battery tunnel. Way off on the horizon, peaking behind the skyscrapers of the financial district, is the Statue of Liberty, dedicated in 1886, long after Whitman had left the city.
Truth be told, the view does not inspire. I am not sure even Whitman could make poetry out of the BQE. And the Container Terminal looks like the parking lot for a superstore no one frequents. If I were less concerned about offending Whitman, I would call the whole vista ugly.
Even so, you can see enough to glimpse what Whitman saw. The gray walls of the granite storehouses are still there, the docks are still there (sort of), and you can still make out the rooftops of houses and the clefts of streets. Most important of all, though, the river is still there.
Why does what you see from the East River Ferry matter? Because, Whitman believes, what you see confirms your immortality. Unlikely as it may seem, Whitman suggests, in these things—buildings, docks, river, even the BQE—you can see why you will live forever. For Whitman, they testify to the provident design of the universe, and they make plain that death is not death but rather a form of rebirth. “It avails not,” Whitman asserts early in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “neither time or place—distance avails not.”8 Similarly, Whitman implies, death, which separates us from time and distances us from everyone and everything else, also avails not. In other poems written just before “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Whitman develops his reasoning about why this is so, but for him, his journey across the East River confirms the intuitions he outlines elsewhere. Death avails not. It is of no use. It does not accomplish the end we think it does. In effect, we outlive it, and the Brooklyn ferry proves it.
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” begins with Whitman aboard the ferry, addressing—commanding—the flood tide of the river to “flow on!” He then claims to watch the flood tide “face to face,” so too the clouds of the west and the setting sun, which he also sees “face to face.” In the lines that follow, Whitman stops addressing the natural world and starts addressing “you”—that is, us, his reader. He states that he finds the crowds of men and women aboard the ferryboats more curious than we might suppose. But Whitman does not stop with the crowds of people he can see. He also claims that “you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence” are also more to him, and more in his thoughts, than we might suppose.9 The direct address is startling. I am thinking of you, reader, Whitman says, and no one else, and for a moment you cannot help but believe him.
Whitman then pauses to reflect on his place in the universe. Things, Whitman implies, give him life. “The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day,” he writes. Moreover, he concludes that he is part of a “simple, compact, well-joined scheme.”10 (Here one can see Whitman the carpenter: “well-joined” refers to joinery, the craft of joining two pieces of wood not with nails but through matching cuts in the wood, like a rabbet and dado.) At this point, Whitman does not reveal the nature of this scheme, and he is only slightly more revealing later in the poem, but he does insist that though he and others may appear to be discrete individuals, they in fact belong to the same scheme. How does he know? Because he can see the “ties” between himself and those who will follow him.11 Others, he observes, just as I did that June morning, will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore, and, in so doing, they will see the same things the poet saw: the run of the flood tide, the ships of Manhattan to the north and west, the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east, the islands large and small, and the setting sun.
For Whitman, these shared visions allow those who see them to transcend time, place, and distance. Aboard the East River Ferry, I see more or less what Whitman saw. He and I share a connection. But Whitman and I—or you, or anyone who sees what he sees—share more than just a connection. Whitman seems to imply that we share a common existence. “Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,” Whitman writes,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river, and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, and yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.12
If, as Whitman earlier claims, we are influenced by—perhaps even derived from—the things around us, then when others witness or experience those same things, they will in some important way become like us, perhaps even become us. In short, you are what you see.
If so, then even though I die, Whitman says, I will be near to you because you now look at what I looked at. We are looking at the same things, and those things unite us. We share a vision, and thus we share an identity. At that moment, I am you and you are me.
What follows is the passage quoted above, the one in which Whitman describes what he sees as he looks toward Brooklyn and the lower bay, further connecting us to him through these closely observed visions. But as the poem progresses, Whitman insists that more unites us than just what we see. Places and objects unite us, yes, but so too do more intangible things, like questions about the universe, which, the poet claims, he also felt stir within him, and which also came upon him in his walks home late at night or as he lay in his bed. Our bodies also unite us—not that we share bodies but that we each have one, and therefore share the experience of having a body.
More significantly, what Whitman calls “the dark patches” also unite us. In one of the most powerful passages in the poem, Whitman writes:
It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw patches down upon me also,
The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious,
My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? Would not people laugh at me?
It is not you alone who know what it is to be evil,
I am he who knew what it was to be evil,
I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,
Blabbed, blushed, resented, lied, stole, grudged,
Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, a solitary committer, a coward, a malignant person,
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,
The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,
Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting.13
Whitman balances these dark patches and evil instances with a recitation of other, less dispiriting experiences. I was also free, friendly, and proud, he says. I was on a first-name basis with many people around the city. Like us, too, or so he imagines, Whitman regrets that he never tells these people whom he called by their first names that he loved them. Yet he also recognizes that, like others, more often than not his days are not tragic but ordinary. I lived the same life as everyone else, he says, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping, and, like others, played a minor part on the stage of history.
Following these lines, Whitman ventures—and I believe he is right—that he has gained our confidence. “Closer yet I approach you,” he boasts, certain that since he has confessed his doubts and errors, and certain that since you have no doubt harbored those same doubts and errors, that you and he have now formed an even tighter bond.14
He then says something that, at first glance, appears paradoxical: “I considered long and seriously of you before you were born.” Of course, this statement cannot be literally true. Whitman cannot have considered long and seriously of me before I was born because there was no “me” for him to consider of. What he seems to mean, instead, is that he considered long and seriously of what I must be—that is, me to the extent that I share qualities or characteristics with himself and others. In other words, Whitman means I considered long and seriously of human beings, and since you are a human being, I considered long and seriously of you. Again, Whitman bypasses what individualizes us for what unites us.
The poem grows even spookier when in the lines that follow Whitman suggests that he lives on, that he may even be enjoying this, by which he means, presumably, us reading of how he considered long and seriously of us before we were born. “Who knows,” he asks, “but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?”15 Yes, Whitman is claiming to watch you as you read him. Frustratingly, he does not give us a reason why he thinks this, but only raises it as a possibility. Equally frustrating, he hints that he knows more than he is letting on. “Every thing indicates,” he writes, but he does not say what it indicates, only that everything, including our souls, is shrouded in “a necessary film,” which suggests that whatever it is that everything indicates, it may be hard to see.16
Nevertheless, Whitman, like an impatient philosopher, states that it is all perfectly clear. “We understand each other, then, do we not?” he writes, and jauntily plows ahead:
What I promised without mentioning it, have you not accepted?
What the study could not teach—what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplished, is it not?
What the push of reading could not start is started by me personally, is it not?17
Alas, Whitman does this sort of thing all the time. He does not argue or convince; he assumes, and then moves on, in his mind, to the more interesting business of describing, illustrating, and sometimes taunting those who do not share his assumptions.
At times, this method can leave you wondering what in the world Whitman is on about. In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” the clue, I think, lies in his phrase “what the preaching could not accomplish.” To preach means, of course, to speak in public on religious matters. Another, more specific sense is to preach the gospel, and the gospel, as your friend who studied Latin can tell you, means the good news, the good story (god equals good and spel equals story). Later, people will take god (good) to mean God, and thus “good news” and “good story” to mean “God news,” “God story.” In other words, Whitman is telling us the good news, the news about God. However, he is merely telling us that there is good news—not what the news is. He gives us the headline without the story.
Unfortunately, at this point, we are more or less at the end of the poem. Whitman revisits all the things he has seen and described in the poem: the river, the flood tide, the ebb tide, the waves, the clouds, the crowds of passengers, the tall masts of ships, the beautiful hills of Brooklyn, the seagulls, and so on, and urges each thing to do what it does. Whitman implies that if we have any lingering questions or doubts, these natural facts will answer them, but it feels like someone is repeating an explanation you do not understand only this time more loudly. The volume, or, in this case, the added poetic touches, do not clarify things. Nor do the concluding lines of the poem. Whitman continues to give orders before stopping to draw his conclusion:
Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual!
Keep your places, objects than which none is more lasting.
You have waited, you always wait, you dumb beautiful ministers! you novices!
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward,
Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us,
We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us,
We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also,
You furnish your parts toward eternity,
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.18
Although much remains ambiguous here, one thing is clear. Unlike most religions, which see this world and this life as finite and merely prelude to the next, Whitman makes no such distinctions. Instead of diminishing this world, the objects and experiences all around us, which he calls “being,” he orders it to expand, since nothing else is more lasting and spiritual. Similarly, whereas in most religions the soul is something distinct from ordinary matter, for Whitman our soul derives from the objects in this world. As in the opening and closing lines of the poem, they furnish their parts toward the soul.
On the surface, the poem celebrates New York City, and Whitman comes off as the loyal native son. This place, these objects, these people made me, just as they made others before me and will go on making others after me. They furnish their parts “toward the soul,” and since they will always furnish their parts toward the soul, they furnish their parts toward eternity. If so, then the least we can do is notice them. Although, what we ought to do is love them as we love ourselves and others.
At the same time, Whitman gives the impression that these objects do more than just remind us of the glories of this world. As much as we receive them with “free sense,” as much as we plant them permanently within us, we do not fathom them, he writes. They have unexplored depths. At the same time, they are—in a wonderful phrase—“dumb, beautiful ministers”: dumb in the sense that they do not speak, beautiful in that they are glorious, and ministers in that they, like Christian or government ministers, are the agents of some higher power. (In the original Latin, minister is an attendant, a servant.) “Novices,” the other word Whitman uses to describe these objects, also fits with this meaning. These objects are novices not in the sense of a person new to an activity, a beginner, but in the religious sense of a new convert, a neophyte, a prospective member of a religious order.
But for what religion are these objects ministering? What higher power do they serve? To what God have they converted? Whitman does not say, but in other poems, and in parts of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Whitman offers enough clues to explain what higher power these dumb, beautiful ministers serve. As we have seen early on in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” everyone belongs to “the simple, compact, well-joined scheme,” which implies not only that there is a scheme, and that it is carefully made, but that there may be a careful maker behind it all, the ultimate joiner, as it were. It is a wonderful image given that the purpose of the poem is to overcome the isolation of our finite lives and join Whitman to everyone who comes before and after him. To understand this scheme, and its schemer, however, we need to pay closer attention to what Whitman believed about the origin and structure of the universe. Although he never comes right out with it, throughout “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and other poems he makes it plain enough.
A few years ago I built a brick storage bench in our backyard. I dug the foundation, spread gravel, poured concrete, and began to lay bricks. As any bricklayer will tell you, the key is to keep things on the level, horizontally and vertically. Over time, master bricklayers learn to eyeball a structure and see whether it is level. The rest of us have to rely on a spirit level, those long pieces of wood, metal, or plastic with a small clear tube and a bubble inside. (Spirit levels get their name not for any ghostly reasons but because the liquid in the bubble is usually a mineral spirit like alcohol or ether.) If you are keeping your brickwork level, the bubble comes to rest between the two lines. If, like me, you are not, the bubble wanders to one side of the tube or the other.
If you have ever tried to submerge a beach ball in a swimming pool only to have it burst to the surface, you already know how spirit levels work. The short answer is gravity. (The long answer is gravity plus buoyancy.) The incredible mass of Earth creates its own gravitational pull, drawing objects close to it. If you jump in the air, for instance, you do not go floating off into space but are quickly pulled back to the ground. The force of gravity can also accumulate. For example, when I hold my daughter on my shoulders, I have to lift her up—overcome the force of gravity pressing her back toward the earth. If my wife put our daughter on her shoulders and I then tried to put both of them on my shoulders, I would have to assume the weight—the downward force of gravity—of both my wife and daughter.
The same goes for any object on the bottom of the gravitational pile. For example, water at the bottom of a drinking glass bears all the weight of the water above it. We say that the pressure is greater the deeper you go. And the difference in pressure from bottom to top tends to exert an upward force. We call this buoyancy. If you put something heavy into the glass—say a coin—gravity will pull it downward. That is, gravity exerts a stronger downward force on the coin than the buoyant pressure upward can overcome. Conversely, if you put something light into the glass, like a toothpick or an air bubble, it will rise to the surface, where the pressure is lighter. For the same reason, a beach ball filled with air rushes to the surface despite your efforts to hold it underwater.
The very same principles apply to a spirit level. The air bubble always rises to the surface of the heavier condensed liquid. The final piece of the puzzle is that the little glass tube that houses the bubble only looks straight; in fact, it curves down at the ends, like a frown or a banana. Therefore, if the surface you are measuring is level, the bubble will rise to the exact center, the highest point, and nestle pleasingly between the two lines. If the surface is at all slanted, however, the air bubble will gravitate—literally—to the highest point, but the highest point will no longer fall in the middle of the two lines. It will drift to the right or left. All thanks to gravity—and buoyancy. But mostly gravity.
Gravity does not exist just here on earth. It exerts its force everywhere in the universe. Indeed, the universe could not exist without it. Gravity caused disparate matter to coalesce into suns, planets, and moons; it set the earth spinning; and it keeps planets circulating around suns, and moons circulating around planets. Like an invisible spider’s web, it holds the universe together.19
As an ambitious autodidact, Whitman went out of his way to learn about gravity. As a builder of houses he had firsthand experience with it. “The power by which the carpenter plumbs his house,” Whitman wrote in one of his early notebooks, “is the same power that dashed his brains out if he fall from the roof.”20 (“Plumb” refers to the other way carpenters used gravity to build, this time vertically. A “plumb bob” is a weight on the end of a string that is suspended from some higher point. Because gravity pushes down on the weight, if you follow the plumb line as you build up, you will build a perfect vertical.) In his poems, too, Whitman often refers to gravity. In “Song of Myself,” he writes that “I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by after all.”21 Elsewhere in that poem, he describes himself as “Plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams.”22 (“Entretied,” by the way, simply means plastered.) In these references to the level and plumb, Whitman is talking about himself, of course, but also what allows him to be so certain of himself. As with gravity, he merely follows the laws of the universe. “I see that the elementary laws never apologize,” Whitman writes in “Song of Myself,” and neither shall Whitman.23 Indeed, he occasionally speaks of gravity and these elementary laws in the same breath. In an 1855 poem, later given the title “A Song for Occupations,” Whitman writes of “the attraction of gravity and the great laws and the harmonious combinations and the fluids of the air.”24 (Keep an eye on that phrase, “the fluids of the air.” It will matter in a moment.)
Gravity, as these passages suggest, meant more to Whitman than just a way to keep houses standing. For Whitman, the existence of such a crucial, unerring law implied that the universe made sense. It followed a deliberate plan; it formed a “simple, compact, well-join’d scheme,” as he put it in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” If so, then there must have been a planner, a schemer. At the least, there was a plan, a scheme, and Whitman, as others do, found this very comforting.
Admittedly, talk of plans and planners might sound like so much twaddle about intelligent design. But consider how many things, including gravity, had to go right for life to exist in the universe, indeed, for the universe even to exist. And it is not just the presence or absence of something like gravity. Gravity has to be perfect, exactly what it is, no more, no less, for the universe and for life on earth to appear. If gravity had been stronger or weaker by one infinitesimal part, for example, the sun would not exist. It would collapse in upon itself or never have formed in the first place. And the same goes for a number of other forces that shape the universe. If the electrical forces that hold atoms together were minimally stronger or weaker, they would not have converted so readily into the elements needed to create, well, all the elements (carbon, oxygen) of life. “Almost everything about the basic structure of the universe,” the philosopher Robin Collins concludes, “is balanced on a razor’s edge for life to occur.”25 You could call it luck, but it also looks like design or the residue of design, which would suggest the existence of some designer somewhere. In order to avoid just this conclusion, physicists speculate that many universes must exist or must have existed. In other words, the odds against suns, planets, and life occurring in any given universe are so incredible that, like monkeys at a typewriter trying to pound out Hamlet, you would need a million (or more) chances to produce the forces necessary to create and sustain things like suns, planets, elements, atoms, and, ultimately, life. And when you think of it that way, the existence of one universe, made by one Creator, seems comparatively plausible.26
Not everyone assents to these teleological arguments for God’s existence. Still, they appealed to Whitman, and he was not alone. Whitman lived in an era when science did not stand opposed to religion but rather was thought to reveal the lines by which God, or some such force, laid out the universe. “It is no little matter,” Whitman writes in an 1855 poem, “this round and delicious globe, moving so exactly in its orbit forever and ever, without one jolt or the untruth of a single second.”27 And it was no little matter because such orbits implied a meticulously planned universe. In the aptly titled “Faith Poem,” from 1856, Whitman writes: “I do not doubt that the orbs, and the systems of orbs, play their swift sports through the air on purpose.”28 In “Song of Myself” he asks, “Did you think the celestial laws are yet to be worked over and rectified?” He leaves the question unanswered since he cannot imagine anyone answering no.29
Time and again, Whitman speaks of the universe and its laws, its purposes, including, for him, death, which was as much a part of the benevolent plan of the universe as gravity. In particular, Whitman seems to have drawn from his reading in astronomy and chemistry the principle of the conservation of matter, which holds that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. For Whitman, the same principle applied to life. What looked like death was merely transformation, a new birth. His favorite metaphor for this rebirth is compost. The dead are buried in the ground, and new life rises out of them. “What chemistry!” he exclaims in an 1856 poem dedicated to this theme, originally titled “Poem of Wonder at the Resurrection of the Wheat” and later simply “This Compost.”30 “The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead,” he writes.31 Later in the poem, he expresses his terrified admiration for the earth. “It gives such divine materials to men and accepts such leavings from them at last.”32 In “Song of Myself,” he writes, “As to you Corpse, I think you are good manure.”33
Indeed, the principle of the conservation of matter provided Whitman with one of the most famous passages in all of his poetry. “A child said, What is the grass, fetching it to me with full hands,” Whitman writes in “Song of Myself.” After trying out a few answers, he responds:
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;
It may be you are from old people and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps,
And here you are the mothers’ laps.34
“The smallest sprout,” he continues, “shows there is no death.”35 Indeed, it made no more sense to speak of the “death” of the molecules that form your body as you pass from your bodily state to some other state (grass, some other life-form) as it did to speak of the “death” of an oxygen molecule as it combines with two hydrogen molecules to form water. In both cases, something simply becomes something else. In our universe, nothing dies. So too for the something that is us. When we die, so to speak, our souls, like our bodies, assume another form. As for molecules, so for us. “We,” our essential selves, live on. In an 1856 poem, “Clef Poem,” Whitman writes:
I do not know what follows the death of my body
But I know well that whatever it is, it is best for me.
And I know well that what is really Me shall live just as much as before.36
If so, then death does not mark the end of life but the beginning of a new life. “No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before,” Whitman says in “Song of Myself” and of course he cannot mean die in the way you and I do since, literally speaking, you only die once.37 But for Whitman death is not death. It is transformation.
This principle proved immensely comforting to Whitman. Later in “Song of Myself,” Whitman addresses all the souls sickened by death:
Down-hearted doubters, dull and excluded,
Frivolous sullen moping angry affected disheartened atheistical,
I know every one of you, and know the unspoken interrogatories,
By experience I know them.38
Whitman goes on to compare these interrogatories to flukes, a kind of fish, and sympathizes with those who are subject to them: “How the flukes splash! / How they contort rapid as lightning, with spasms and spouts of blood!”39 In the lines that follow, Whitman orders the “bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mopers”—he means us—to “be at peace.” Speaking of death, he writes, “What is untried and afterward is for you and me and all.” He confesses, “I do not know what is untried and afterward, / But I know it is sure and alive, and sufficient.”40 Later, he says, “Our rendezvous is fitly appointed, / God will be there and wait till we come.”41 And in a poem he would later call simply “Faith,” Whitman writes, “I do not doubt that the passionately-wept deaths of young men are provided for—and that the deaths of young women, and the deaths of little children, are provided for,” and by “provided for” Whitman seems to mean taken care of, a contingency considered in advance.42 He may have hoped his readers would also think of “providence,” the care or benevolent guidance of God or nature. Death, in this way of thinking, is provident. It has been foreseen and accounted for. More than provident, Whitman speculates that death might be the purpose of life. In any event, since death is part of the universe, it serves some purpose. To speak the language of computer programming, death was not a bug but a feature. If so, and if we trust in the plan of the universe, then we should not mourn our deaths but celebrate them. In dying, and in taking new form, we participate in the laws of the universe. As he tells the one shortly to die in a poem of the same name, “I do not commiserate, I congratulate you.”43
In sum, as Whitman writes in “Song of Myself,” “It is not chaos or death. . . . it is form and union and plan. . . . it is eternal life. . . . it is happiness.”44 As many poems make clear, Whitman did not believe in a conventional Christian God. But he did believe that something—a spirit, a force—created the universe, and that death belonged to the purposes of that creation as much as life. You could count on death as reliably as you count on gravity.
The poems sampled above clarify a number of ambiguities in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Midway through that poem, as Whitman is considering what it is that connects him to us, he says, “I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution.”45 “Float” here refers to “the fluids of the air” we have seen Whitman celebrating in another poem, “A Song for Occupations.” According to the science of the day—and ours, as it happens—the universe once consisted of a nebulous cloud of gases and dust that condensed to form the sun and planets. (Here too all thanks go to gravity.) The theory dates back to the rogue philosopher, scientist, and theologian Emmanuel Swedenborg, but it found new life in the work of the French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace. (Whitman likely read of Laplace’s nebular hypothesis in the Scottish journalist Robert Chambers’s 1844 book of popular science, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.)46 For nebulae, Whitman often substituted “float,” though he uses both terms interchangeably. Except for occasionally varying his terms, Whitman seems to have adopted the nebular hypothesis completely.
As Whitman saw it, the nebular hypothesis also explained the origins and evolution of human life, and here too he is not too far from what astronomers today believe. The same matter—the nebular gases and dust—that formed stars and planets also formed us, formed, for that matter, everything. As Carl Sagan used to intone, “The earth, and every living thing, is made of star-stuff,” and he meant that the elements that compose us (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen) were themselves formed within stars and then released into the universe when a star reached the end of its life span and blew itself up. “The cosmos,” Sagan used to say, sounding very Whitmanesque, “is also within us.”47 Among other things, those elements formed our planet and the chemical life of our planet, and eventually that star-stuff evolved into me, you, Walt Whitman, everything and everyone. Each of us “had been struck from the float forever held in solution,” as Whitman puts it in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”
As you can imagine, this view of the universe invests everyday objects with an incredible if often overlooked grandeur. Hence “the glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings,” as Whitman describes them in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”48 Thus could objects, as he also says in that poem, function as “dumb beautiful ministers.” After all, they partook of star-stuff, too. They revealed God or the spirit of the universe as much as we or anything else in the universe did. “I do not doubt but the majesty and beauty of the world is latent in any iota of the world,” Whitman writes in “Faith Poem.”49 “I hear and behold God in every object,” he writes in “Song of Myself,” and proclaims elsewhere in that poem that “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars.”50 “Journeywork” refers to work done by a journeyman, a craftsman; the journey work of the stars is life on Earth. For Whitman, everything traces its existence, its being and makeup, back to the stars.
For Whitman, then, it all added up. The universe followed certain laws, like gravity or the conservation of matter. The existence of those laws implied a rationally ordered universe. Therefore, everything within that rationally ordered universe, including death, must have a reason for being. Nowhere does he express this sense of death and its place in an ordered universe better than in the aptly titled “Burial Poem.” “Do you suspect death?” Whitman asks his reader.
If I were to suspect death I should die now.
Do you think I could walk pleasantly and well-suited toward annihilation?51
The answer, of course, is no, because, as he puts it in the final lines of the poem:
I swear I think there is nothing but immortality!
That the exquisite scheme is for it, and the nebulous float is for it, and the cohering is for it,
And all preparation is for it . . . and identity is for it . . . and life and death is for it.52
In short, everything in the universe pointed away from death and toward life. Or, rather, further life through death.
Armed with this knowledge, the opening of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” now makes much more sense. Whitman begins the poem by commanding the “flood tide of the river” to “flow on!” He addresses the flood tide as a “you,” claiming to watch it “face to face.”53 The first time around, the line merely seems clever. Leaning over the ship’s railing looking down into the water, Whitman sees his reflection in the flood tide and can thus watch it face to face. If you think about it, though, there is more to the line than mere cleverness. Inasmuch as everything—leaves of grass, flood tides, poets—are the offspring of the stars, the same spirit of creation infuses all. Just as the stars are us, and we are the stars, so too is the flood tide us, and we the flood tide. Everything tells the same wonderful story about the universe. Everything is a dumb, beautiful minister preaching the providence and purposefulness of existence. (It does not hurt, either, that flood tides occur because of gravity.) It is possible, then, to see yourself, your face, in the flood tide, in everything. Everything is a mirror, whether it reflects or not.
As “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” makes plain, too, these shared origins of existence obtain regardless of time, place, or distance. Brooklyn and Manhattan of 1856 may look rather different from present-day Brooklyn and Manhattan, but the same tide ebbs and flows, the same celestial laws rule the earth, and the same star-stuff infuses all of existence. That people dress differently or take different modes of transportation is negligible. We all, regardless of era, are the journey-work of the stars. We all follow the same laws of chemistry and physics, including the law that we must die. But the celestial law also confirms that we die merely to live again.
Riding the East River Ferry, sharing it with tourists looking at the skyline of Manhattan and commuters looking at the screens of their smartphones, the world, with Whitman in mind, suddenly seems like a far more magical place. Before your eyes, everything—river, skyline, tourist, and banker—glows with its inner star-stuff and beats to the pulse of universal laws.
Before climbing aboard the East River Ferry or reading Whitman so intensely, I did not give much thought to gravity, star-stuff, or our exquisitely fine-tuned universe. But when you pause to think about it, as Whitman forces you to, existence is a miracle, or whatever secular term one wants to adopt in place of miracle. And that I exist out of all the possible forms existence could take is more miraculous still.
Unfortunately, I truly hate to report, this vision does not necessarily make me feel all that better about death. In persuading us of the miracle of existence, Whitman may only worsen the sense of loss we feel when that miraculous existence is taken away from us, as it is at death. This is particularly the case if you remain skeptical of his intimations of immortality. In a crude way, Whitman is right about the conservation of matter. Our corpse will make good manure, and like a couple after a breakup, the atoms that compose us will move on to other things. But we are not the atoms that compose us. The atoms that compose us may survive our bodily death, but no one cares about her atoms. We care about our consciousness, what Whitman calls the “really Me,” and the really Me occurs because of a particular arrangement of atoms, which, so far as I can tell, do not survive our bodily death.54
Here, then, is what will prevent most of us from crediting Whitman and his gospel of death. Whitman believes in a soul distinct from a body. Or, at least, a soul that is ultimately unfettered to any single body. Our bodies die, Whitman allows, but our souls survive. Today, however, this distinction is untenable. We know that our soul—our consciousness—derives almost exclusively from our bodies. If dynamite explodes before it is supposed to, driving a long iron rod through the left frontal lobe of your brain, you will be a different “really You” after the accident than you were before. And if an iron rod can change your soul, imagine what death can do to it. All of which is to say that what you and I think of as the soul—the really Me—is very much a material phenomenon. Basically, we are our brains, and our brains depend upon our living, perceiving bodies. The really Me, strictly speaking, cannot survive that loss.
So when Whitman congratulates us on our death, or insists that there is nothing but immortality, I really want to believe him. I doubt that more than a handful of us can believe him, however. We know too much. These days, when I lie in bed at night, I still think of the total emptiness forever that awaits me.
Curiously, it is not Whitman’s views on mortality and immortality that console us about death, but rather his take on property, about which he also had decided opinions. Whitman believed we suffered from a “mania for owning things,” and this same mania may also lead us astray when it comes to thinking about life and death.
As I discuss in the next chapter, the universe may have properties for Whitman, but property is not one of them. In his view, no one owns anything, and no one can own anything. His belief rests on the fact that atoms, the fundamental constituents of the universe (or what were thought so at the time), do not respect or even require the notion of property. For example, you do not even own the atoms that constitute you. When you die, “your” atoms will disperse into the chemical life of the planet, where they might become the soil out of which plants grow, then the air that someone else breathes, then part of that person, then into the atmosphere or soil, then elsewhere, on and on. But at no point does anyone own them. They came together awhile to form you. Soon enough, they will disperse and form something else. Viewed from this perspective, life on earth—and the earth itself—is just atoms in motion. None of them stops long enough to be owned. If so, Whitman believes, then we ought to be skeptical about a concept like property.
Strangely enough, this insight may help us think about death, too. Our mistake may lie in thinking of life as something we own or possess. If we think of life this way, then when we die and life is taken away from us, we feel like the victim of some injustice. We feel as if we have been robbed.
But life is not something one can or even should hope to possess eternally. Although we keep pushing the numbers beyond what anyone thought possible, and currently house about seven billion people, the earth can nevertheless only support a finite number of people at any one time. We might disagree about whether we have reached those limits, or what they are, but few would disagree that there are limits. If no one died, the earth would soon be packed cheek by jowl. If so, then for others to enjoy their share of life I must eventually relinquish mine. I cannot hope to own it indefinitely.
I find it helps to think of life as a book you borrow from the library. By this model, life, like the atoms of which it is composed, is not something we own but something we are trusted with for a brief period of time. When we have used it, when we have made of it what we will, we return it and it goes back into general circulation, at which point someone else gets to use it and make of it what she will.
I admit that this analogy only comforts so much. I do not want to return my book when it comes due or, worse yet, when it is recalled early. I very much want to keep it. I have grown to love it. But this may be where we err. We like to think that instead of a library, we find ourselves in a Barnes & Noble, and that the life we select is ours to keep. But the universe is not a Barnes & Noble. We live in a socialist universe, not a capitalist one. Our universe wants everyone to have a chance. It looks askance on those who would try to monopolize resources, especially the most fundamental resource of all, life.
When the day comes when I must die, then, and it hurtles toward me more quickly each moment, I do not want to die feeling like someone who has been mugged on the street and looks around in vain for aid and sympathy, angry that no police officer is there to restore justice or prevent the injustice in the first place. Rather, thinking of Whitman, I would like to die like an eccentric philanthropist, like someone who gives away everything he owns so that others may live. In other words, I do not want to die feeling like something has been taken from me. I want to die feeling like I am giving something back. Whitman helps us feel that. He helps us have the courage to die—and live—like someone who understands that for life to go on, life must end.