(c) Charles D. Hayes
I’ve been working on a forthcoming book for 2019 titled: Blue Bias: A Former Cop Rethinks Policing
and Deadly Force and haven’t posted on this blog in almost a year, although
I do post short pieces frequently on Facebook. I wrote the piece below my sixties and now I
am half way through my seventies and this essay that is from my book Existential
Aspirations is one of my favorites and I find consolation in rereading it every
now and then. So Happy Holidays I hope you find it interesting.
The evidence is pervasive that we are predisposed for illusion.
I’m convinced that the best intellectual exhilaration to be had in adulthood is
to break the spell. The way psychologist Erich Fromm characterized it, aging,
especially after age sixty-five, is a time to live as if living is one’s
main business. To do this effectively requires keeping the alternative in
perspective while cutting through cultural fantasies and popularized nonsense.
Thinking recently about Arthur Schopenhauer’s notion that life
is a loan from death and sleep is the interest we pay on the loan, it occurred
to me that forgetfulness qualifies as a reminder of death. Perhaps this is what
makes it so irritating. As we age it makes sense that many of us seem more
easily annoyed. Forgetfulness, when it becomes increasingly noticeable, is a
constant reminder that we are not in control.
Near the end of his own life, Sigmund Freud theorized about his
long-held notion of the existence of a universal death instinct. He
acknowledged that what most people do about facing death is to shelve the
subject and avoid it with distraction. Freud surmised that all living creatures
struggle with the opposing forces of life and death. He believed that, more
often than not, the death instinct shows itself as varying forms of aggression.
Freud’s theory was not well developed and was not well received in academia.
In my view, a far stronger case can be made that a profound
conscious and subconscious existential fear of death favors distraction as a
means of avoiding thinking about death, period. We occupy ourselves with cards,
television, Internet, books, puzzles, sex, religion, mysticism, golf, a
hobby—whatever it takes. Both high and low culture, and drama in particular,
provide blissful escape and perhaps a vicarious but subtle method for
dissipating our aggression through our imagination, as we sidestep thoughts of
our own mortality. Although distraction appears to ease one’s immediate angst,
in the long run it ratchets up anxiety that can readily turn into despair of
the worst kind, “despair unaware that it’s despair”—as Søren Kierkegaard
defined it. So, in effect, the advantage of distraction is more apparent than
real.
Deep into my sixties, and despite the above, I now find more and
more people willing to discuss the notion of their own death. Through
this, I’ve come to believe that there is also a positive side to counter the
dread of nonexistence that has the potential to show itself nearly as
frequently as the negative reminders like forgetfulness. Trouble is, almost no
one speaks about the affirmative side. I’m confident that I’m not the only
person who has such experiences. There are times, for example, when the music
I’m listening to sounds better than it should be possible for music to sound.
The same feeling occurs with the endorphin rush of comprehension that comes
from reading a particularly inspiring passage in a book or watching an actor or
actress in the delivery of a brilliant performance. Similar feelings occur with
other sights, sounds, and even odors that seem more pronounced than ever
before. These occurrences are moments of intense clarity and exhilaration. They
appear as if in bold capital letters, italicized, and underlined. True, they
are fleeting, but they’re no less powerful for it. The impression on my memory
is like an asterisk on the experience. I may or may not recall it exactly as it
happened, but what matters most is that it did happen and left me with the
optimistic expectation that it might happen again.
I’m at a loss to explain these experiences. They are describable
only as existential exclamation points—a vivid sense of awareness accentuated
with a hint of urgency, part lament, and part celebration. For a long time, I
thought these incidents were something other than what William James discusses
in The Varieties of Religious Experience, or what Abraham Maslow
describes in Peak Experiences,
but now I’m not so sure. The example closest to my own experience that I recall
reading about is philosopher Brian Magee’s emotional elation while listening to
the music of Gustav Mahler, a moment he recounts in Confessions of a Philosopher. It’s not surprising, though, that
there hasn’t been a lot of discussion about the brighter side of gazing into
the abyss, simply because of the common practice of vigorously avoiding the
subject.
Mingled with these highlighted experiences are memories of
events that didn’t seem so special to me when they occurred but that now give
rise to a sense of regret that I may not experience them again. Such memories
might be the mesmerizing sound of crickets on a warm summer night and June bugs
buzzing under a streetlight, fireflies sparkling like embers in deep woods, the
smell of freshly plowed earth, a sudden, blissfully cool downdraft of air
preceding a thunderstorm on a hot summer day, the crisp smell of the coming
winter in late fall. These are all exclamation points not fully appreciated
until the chance of their being repeated is threatened by want of time.
I’m beginning to suspect that all the meaningful knowledge that
prompts people to write books, give lectures, and make movies is a simple
thread of fleeting experience that can only be grasped in brief flashes of
insight. The effect of these moments is so profound that we intuitively spend
the rest of lives in search of more, often without even knowing for sure what
it is that we are pursuing. Thus, for many people, meaningful experience has a
way of becoming the Holy Grail of their existence, often without their ever
realizing it as such.
The longer we live and the more our friends and family members
precede us in death, the more profound I suspect is our awareness of our own
mortality and the more aware we are of our being aware. It’s sort of like a
stage actor who’s observing herself acting but not worrying about how well
she’s doing. Having seen the Discovery Channel’s series about climbing Mt.
Everest, I liken the experience of acknowledging the short time ahead to
trekking at high altitude and seeing the summit in plain sight. It represents
the end. The clearer the end becomes, the more sensitive we are to everything
in our midst, and we can be grateful that the air is too thin at this level to
sustain much pretension. Strewn about below is a lifetime of memories
petitioning to be measured against expectation-- routine and mundane daily
experiences interspersed with moments of high drama that turned days into weeks
and weeks into years.
Our decades are stacked up like chapters in a novel that lacks a
definitive plot; some sections seem as though they belong in the book of a
stranger. “Auld
Lang Syne” rings in our ears, honoring old acquaintances long forgotten.
Images reappear in our mind’s eye, the haunting faces of the elders we knew
when we were young. These are the folks who died out of sight and out of mind,
but as we near our own death, we find ourselves wondering what happened to them
and how and when they passed away. We recall events that seemed critical and
profoundly important at the time, that don’t matter at all now, as well as
matters that once seemed trivial but are no longer. All those unpleasant
memories of occasions we would rather forget come to mind, too, along with
those satisfying experiences we wish we could remember more clearly.
One of the things that I find most regrettable in imagining my
own demise is the reality of the generation break. The fact is that the
memories I have connecting my life to my grandparents will be lost forever.
Sure, I can tell my son and granddaughter about the objects I’m leaving behind
that belonged to my grandparents; I can even explain how and why they are so
special to me, but the meaningfulness won’t be the same. For me, this is an
unshakable existential regret.
Still, so many questions remain unanswered. Has our life been
successful? By whose standards do we judge? What of our legacy? Do we actually
have one? Would we know it if we didn’t have one, or recognize it as a legacy
if we did? What is there left to do that we still might accomplish? If we had
our life to do over again, would it be worth the effort? Would it be worth
reliving eternally? What would we do differently? Have we learned enough about
living to lay down good memories in the present without wishing we could
redirect the scenes? An ending is required to put our story in perspective, and
yet our very nature dictates that doing so will always seem premature.
Perhaps, with the summit in sight, we can imagine that upon our
shoulders rests the mountainous weight of all our earthly problems, and, upon
our demise, these will lift away like a spring mist. Then maybe we can
dissolve some of the angst of our predicament. Moreover, the same can be said
of our discomfort about nonexistence and any aggression we may secretly harbor.
So, even though Freud was probably mistaken about the death instinct, it
doesn’t really matter one way or the other.
As the aging and openly communicative baby-boom generation makes
its way to the peak, I suspect there will be a lot of discussion about subjects
that earlier generations chose to leave on the shelf. Based upon my own
experience, I think that in avoiding such topics our predecessors cheated
themselves out of something constructive that only comes with a harsh dose of
reality and the desire for perspective. Better to do as Emerson and
Schopenhauer suggested: look death in the eye and refuse to blink. Near the
summit, the air is clearer, and one can be more objective than ever before.
Although enough air to maintain the routine of daily life is lacking, available
still is a panoramic, big-picture view that seeks comprehension,
rationalization, and justification. It yields no great secrets; instead, it
reveals a more realistic view of the way the world is, not as we’ve wished it
to be or thought that it was when we were young. The power of this elevated
viewpoint is that it enables us to observe layer upon layer of nonsense we have
constructed with the help of our culture for reasons that may suddenly seem
inconceivable.
This view may be one reason it’s possible to experience moments
of sharp sensory perception, when music can sound better than we’ve ever
suspected possible. It’s a kind of clarity of contrasted experience, part
bittersweet sorrow because life is passing, and part celebration for having had
the privilege of living.
This kind of perception arises in similar fashion to Alan
Watts's “backwards law,” which says, when you let yourself relax in the water,
you don’t sink as you would expect; instead you float. It’s an unencumbered
observer phenomenon unavailable to those whose thirst for security is never
satiated. Watts said, “Belief clings, but faith lets go.” Counterintuitive as
it sounds, I believe that, just as aging makes our lack of influence over the
future more and more self-evident, the letting go of our personal involvement
with the world enables us to see and think clearly enough to do something that
might have lasting consequences. This may be what prompted life-stage
researcher Erik Erikson to observe that wisdom is a product of “involved
disinvolvement,” and why some aging citizens achieve a sense of
“grand-generativity” as a generous and broadly felt sense of goodwill intended
as an aspiration for posterity.
On the dark side, though, are the many people among the living
whose daily existence is but one excruciating health catastrophe after another,
not to mention those who die young and those who experience premature senility.
For persons living in constant pain, with relief coming only from
stupor-inducing drugs, who can blame them for despairing about the mention of
exhilaration and aging together in the same sentence? I think of people in this
circumstance when I encounter the New Age nonsense, so often pitched in
self-help books, with its empty platitudes and cliché-ridden slogans about how
wonderful everything is. When I compare these mindless assertions with
Schopenhauer’s example of the feelings among animals while one is being eaten
by another, the bubble comes back toward the center.
Then there is the late Ernest Becker’s award-winning book, The Denial of Death. Becker argued
that if we were to dwell on it too much, the precariousness of our own
mortality would drive us insane. He may have been right. But too much shelter
from reality also yields deleterious effects. Near the summit, the perspective
is grand, unless, fearing the inevitable, one refuses to look. To perceive of
life metaphorically above the fray of everyday concerns offers a chance for
taking up philosophy, as Thomas Ellis Katen suggests in Doing Philosophy, in order “to get out of the unremitting rain of
unreflected-upon information.” But philosophy, as Socrates demonstrated, and as
many philosophers since have claimed, is also about learning how to die. The
view on high is clear because there is plenty of time and space for the practice
of sheer, unfettered observation and contemplation. Taking in the view from
this level is unique in that after a lifetime of arguing about what is and
isn’t of value, it suddenly becomes clear—real value is not what we thought it
was.
In the spirit of Schopenhauer, Becker wrote in The Denial of Death, “Creation is a
nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for
hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures. The soberest
conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the
planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit
of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood
dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes
with the organism’s comfort and expansiveness.” A bit harsh, I think. Speaking
for myself, I would rather have the chance to appear as a stain in the pit than
not, and I bet I could find lots of folks who would agree with me that there have
been some fine moments on our way to the compost heap.
More than three decades ago,
physicist Stephen Hawking postulated that the existence of black holes means
that all information in the universe will ultimately end. Recently he changed
his mind. Now he argues that the end will come only to information in galaxies
where black holes exist. This kind of logic is probably as close as we will
ever get to why some people seem to live charmed lives and others live in
perpetual misery. It happens sometimes but not always. So, it doesn’t take a
lot of life experience for observant individuals to conceive that for human
beings there are many things worse than death and that both good and ill must
be considered and weighed constantly to keep one’s perspective.
Of course, simply trying to wrap one’s mind around metaphysical
mysteries like time and space being interchangeable, or the unfathomable notion
of space as infinite, or, as the Theory of Relativity suggests, past, present,
and future, coexisting simultaneously, could drive us mad if we thought we had
to reduce these matters to a realm of concrete understanding before we die.
Contemplating these mysteries, I suspect, is analogous to the living brain
trying to comprehend its own nonexistence—the very act of doing so is a
metaphysical violation of causality.
We appear to be wired to shelter ourselves from too much
reality. In Wings of Illusion,
psychologist John F. Schumaker argues that we should think it worthwhile to
determine a proper degree of illusion as a psychological shelter, but to be
very careful about not overdoing it. Recall his epigraph at the beginning of
this essay. If we are truly honest with ourselves, our predisposition to
believe the unbelievable becomes exceptionally clear near the summit. From
here, we can see the distraction for what it is and not be nearly as distraught
as expected.
Another key to understanding the exhilaration possible in facing
death is that when we begin to tweak with our beliefs near the code level of
our biological wiring, haphazardly tripping over endorphins is not unusual. In
other words, contemplating existential matters at high altitude is pleasurable
by design. Schumaker says further that culture absorbs the chaos and
“manufactures the stupidity
that we need in order to function in this world.” Not surprisingly then, when
we begin to figure this out during the existential deliberation that comes
naturally with aging, a sense of suddenly seeing through illusions without the
usual dread can be enthralling. As it turns out, looking death in the eye trips
a pleasure circuit. Neurological testing reveals that when we contemplate death
directly, our brain responds by activating positive information to
compensate.
We are all familiar with the process of meeting overwhelmingly
bad news with denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance
that presumably evolves into a stoic resolve. But for many of us, age catches
up-- like the frog in hot water that begins to boil before he can escape—and by
the time we awaken enough to see the summit in plain view, it is much too late
to deny our mortality. There is nothing to bargain about. Time is short.
And furthermore, nothing is to be gained from fear and depression but the
possibility of missing a last chance to make some subjective sense of it all.
Simply stated, the last chapters of life require some graduate- level thinking
to ensure that we’ve fully checked in before we check out.
A determined effort to
develop our perspective from a philosophical position near the end of life may
well result in some of the best times we ever have. Such effort has the potential
for having a lasting effect on whatever legacy we leave behind, provided there
are no black holes in the neighborhood and there is new grass to cover the pit.
The payoff from thoughtful reflection is the ability to see through the
nonsensical distractions that are detrimental to civilization and our progeny’s
future. Exclamation points are where you find them, and when you really
start to pay attention because time is short, the rewards are
exhilarating. One final but pleasurable thought on the quandary of death.
Perhaps, if Einstein was right about the coexistence of past, present and
future, the worst that can happen to us is to be lost in time. Thoughts?
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