Death

Michael Hauskeller & Panayiota Vassilopoulou

MH: When I was a little boy, I don’t know how old exactly, perhaps five or six, there were many nights I couldn’t sleep because I was so afraid of dying. I was also afraid that my parents might die (and eventually one of them did, my father, when I was nine), but that fear was of a different kind: it was the fear of being left alone in a world that I did not quite understand yet and that I felt unable to deal with by myself. I knew that something like that might happen, and it scared me quite a bit, but the fear that sometimes overcame me when I thought of my own death was much more intense and powerful. I was not just afraid of dying: I was terrified, so much so that I could hardly breathe, my chest being too tight and my heart beating too fast. I was in a panic, unable to sleep for hours. And it wasn’t the possibility of dying that terrified me. I wasn’t afraid that I might contract a deadly disease or get run over by a car, or for some other reason suffer a premature death. I didn’t really expect to be dying anytime soon. What terrified me so much was the absolute certainty of my death, the fact that one day, however far in the future that day may be, I would cease to exist, and then never exist again. I don’t know how I knew this. I guess that someone had told me that everyone dies, me included, but there must have been many other things I had been told that I was far less sure of. Yet for some reason, I never had any doubt that this particular bit of information was indeed correct and that there was not the slightest chance for me not to die. I simply knew that I was mortal, and I was overwhelmed and petrified by this knowledge.

The terror that I felt had nothing to do with any views about what would happen to me after my death. My mother tried to raise me as a Catholic, making me study the Bible in Sunday school and regularly sending me to church to confess my sins, but none of this made much of an impression on me, except the claim that God sees everything, often repeated, for my personal benefit, by both my mother and the village priest who schooled me. This did not prevent me from doing things that I wasn’t supposed to be doing, but it certainly instilled a sense of being watched in me. I may also have half-believed in heaven and hell, in the sense that I wasn’t entirely sure that no such thing existed. My fear of death, however, was not affected by that. I did not fear ending up in hell. What I was terrified of was the idea of nothingness, for that is what I imagined death to be: the end of everything, an abyss that I would fall into, an eternal darkness swallowing me up, an emptiness so deep that there was no way I could possibly wrap my mind around it. It was something that defied understanding, certainly my understanding, something that could not be, yet still was, a disturbing paradox at the heart of existence.

This was a long time ago. Being much older now and therefore much closer to death, I no longer feel the same terror in the face of my own mortality. I have not exactly become indifferent to it, but what I feel is not terror, but rather a mild trepidation, a discomfort, an unease. Whatever negative feelings I still have about my death, they are not the kind that keeps me up at night. For the most part, I sleep comfortably. Yet it is far from obvious what has changed for me. The facts, after all, seem to be the same. I still believe that death is certain and that I will cease to exist when it comes. And I still find it impossible to understand it. I know that there was a time in the past when I did not exist. In fact, the time during which I did not exist exceeds the time that I have existed by billions of years. In that sense, my non-existence is far more natural, far more normal than my existence. My existence is an anomaly. Yet for some reason the non-existence that lies behind me feels less of a problem than the non-existence that lies ahead of me. I am not wondering all that much about how it is possible that there was a time when I did not exist. It certainly does not concern me. My future non-existence, however, both puzzles and concerns me. But perhaps it should concern me more. Perhaps the downright terror that I felt as a child was the more appropriate response to the fact of our mortality. Or perhaps I should, on the contrary, be even less concerned about it than I am. Perhaps I should not be concerned at all.

*

PV: Non-existence does not scare me at all. Death, in my mind, is more related to suffering and most importantly to the suffering that one’s death would cause to others. I do not want to die before my mother and I do not want to die after my daughter. The thought of my mother mourning my death is unbearable; this would devastate her, more than any other death, as the experience of my daughter’s death would devastate me. For any parent the loss of their offspring seems the most acute pain, the most intense suffering. And I say this, having of course imagined these deaths in great detail. I have imagined – as I believe is the case with many of us, or so psychology tells us – the circumstances, the consequences, the grieving of the death of loved ones throughout my life from childhood to maturity: terrible thoughts, guilty thoughts, tormenting and yet so compelling. So, why is it that nothingness does not concern me, and why is it that I am so troubled by suffering – perhaps as much attracted, as I am averse to it? Isn’t existence, being, life that which we cherish most and, if so, shouldn’t its extinction be the greatest loss, the greatest fear?

Let us imagine a situation where the world as we know it ceases to exist: people, cities, the universe, they all die, everything becomes nothing. What of it? If there were no one left to remember, to experience this nothingness and have to live with it, what would this have to do with any of us? What would concern me in such a situation is how this obliteration came about: was it the result of a war, of the destruction of the environment, of my own or of other beings’ thoughts and actions? These are the only questions, the only fears, that concern me and this is so because the answers they admit affect the life that I, and others, lead. But what of a partial destruction, where there is indeed someone left to remember, someone or some ones that are left behind?

In the prospect of the death of others, especially loved ones, and of my own death, it is not death but life that seems invariably meaningless. It is not non-existence, the mere fact of absence, that is most painful and meaningless, but the experience of this absence, the present and future of a life in absentia. Van Gogh’s paintings of peasants’ shoes, a theme to which he often returned, portray this in an exemplary manner: a person dies, but their belongings, the books they read, the sheets they slept in, photographs, letters, images carved in memory – like a pair of worn-out shoes – are all left with the living. Similarly of course with nature or culture: consider the destruction of Palmyra by Isis not long ago, which is reported as an atrocity that has ‘ripped out the heart of the city’. The absence of the dead does not feel like nothingness or non-existence at all; on the contrary, there is no presence, no darkness more tangible, more unbearably visible, than the deeply felt absence. And now that I am older and have had actual experiences of the death of others, of dear ones, I can see how life goes on in the absence of those that died – without them, without any one of us. ‘The world will live and die even without me’, I read in a novel when I was a teenager and never forgot it (although I have forgotten everything else about that book). Perhaps I have been rehearsing this idea all along, with reference to that or rather those who are more near and dear, as a way of coming to terms with the finality of life, with there being meaning in life despite of death; but how about because of it?

The conception of philosophy as a study of death in Plato’s Phaedo is intended as a mental process and practice through which we are to understand and reconcile with our mortality. The inevitability of death marks an end to one’s life (at least earthly life), while birth (or conception) marks the beginning. Thus conceived, life unfolds in a linear fashion from a beginning towards an end, very much unlike the seasons or ‘the clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face’, as the song goes. Of course Plato, in this dialogue and elsewhere, is arguing for immortality, in terms of the pre-existence of soul before birth and its existence after death: if philosophy is the study of death, immortality is the assessment of this study. And if successful, Plato’s arguments would establish that death is a matter of the body, a mere fact holding for everything bodily and not the real death of ‘us’. Note that immortality is not the same as everlastingness; it is not more of the same, as it were, but a life of a different kind, a life outside time, where being present before and absent after, or even existing as an individual before or after, makes no sense. Hence Christians talk not just of the immortality of the soul, but more explicitly about resurrection: a new life, a totally other life that awaits ‘us’, not only our soul but also our body, after death. But both agree that it is because of this other life that the embodied life, day after day, makes any sense, if at all: if life, my life, has a meaning, this is drawn from elsewhere – what Plato called the world of ideas, what Christians call God. That which matters is never lost and that which is lost never mattered. And yet, in the thought of an afterlife I find no consolation at all: devoted Platonists and Christians or not, we all cry when a loved one dies. It is this sadness, this emptiness, that I fear most.

*

MH: Epicurus famously argued that death is simply non-existence and that non-existence is not to be feared. There are many things that can harm us when we are alive, but nothing can when we are dead. As long as we are, death is not, and as soon as death has come, we are not. We only fear death because we confusedly imagine ourselves experiencing our own death: not the process of dying, but the condition of being dead. Yet when we are dead we are not aware of our condition, and what is more, there no longer is an I that can experience or for that matter be anything at all. The condition of being dead is not a condition we can ever be in. That is why, according to Epicurus, death should not concern us. But if death cannot harm the one who is dead, precisely because death is pure nothingness, why then do we mourn the dead? Why do we care when someone dies, why do we suffer if we believe that nothing bad has happened to them? Yes, if a loved one dies, we keenly feel their absence and that absence does become a presence that overshadows and darkens our life. Their death is bad for us because it hurts us so. But again, why does it hurt us? Is it merely because we are now no longer able to spend time with them, to talk to them, to hear and see and touch them? Imagine your loved one, instead of dying, simply leaves, and you know there is little or no chance you will ever see them again. They are out of your life now for good. No doubt you will find this very hard to accept. You will suffer from their absence; you may even find it unbearable. But is it as bad as if they had died? If you knew they had a good life somewhere else, living somewhere without you, but happy and fulfilled, could you not find solace in this knowledge? Could you not be happy for them? In contrast, when people die, they do more than just leave you. It is true that they are no longer in your presence, that they are absent from you and for you, but at the same time their absence is more than just an absence from you. It is an absence from the world. They have not just left you behind, they have left everything behind. They have fallen from the edge of the world. And isn’t that what makes the death of a loved one so unbearable?

More than a hundred thousand people die every day. The vast majority of those deaths do not affect us. Which is a good thing: we wouldn’t be able to live if they did. We would, however, not say that those deaths do not matter, even if they don’t matter much to us. Of course, many of those who die are loved by someone. They will be mourned and missed by someone, just not by us. Yet there are also people out there who are loved by nobody. No one really cares if they live or die. Nobody will suffer from their absence; few may even notice that they are gone. In that case, would there be nothing bad about their death? Say there was an opportunity to painlessly kill somebody who, to the best of our knowledge, is not loved and will not be mourned or missed by anyone. Would it not still be wrong to do so? And wouldn’t it be wrong precisely because it is bad for them to cease to exist or to enter a state of non-existence?

Death is not bad because we suffer when it comes for those we love. Rather, we suffer because we feel that something terrible has happened to them: that they have been deprived of life; that something good and beautiful has been taken away from them. We may also feel that with their death something good and beautiful has been taken away from the world, that the world is poorer without them. For the same reason we may mourn the loss of great works of art or places of natural beauty: not because we can no longer experience them (or we can no longer experience them), but because they are gone and will never come back. They have not just been moved to a different place that we happen to no longer have access to. They have completely vanished from the universe. If death and destruction were bad only because of the suffering that they cause (and only if they cause such suffering), then we could in principle overcome the evil of death (if it is indeed an evil) simply by changing the way we feel about it. That is precisely what Epicurus urged us to do: to understand that non-existence cannot harm us and is therefore neither to be feared when it happens to ourselves, nor to be deplored when it happens to others. We may feel sad when they die, but we really shouldn’t. Our sadness about the death of others is just as much owed to a misconception of what death is as the fear we have of our own death.

But if that is so, why is that misconception so persistent?

*

PV: We do not fear only bad things but also good things—to take on a new, better job but with increased responsibility, to become parents, to perform in public, to fall in love at the ‘wrong moment’. In other words, we do not only fear distraction, loss, or pain but also, or even mostly, we fear the unknown: we fear change, uncertainty, consequences of our actions that we cannot foresee. The future, our future, unknown to each one of us, is as much desired as it is feared. What matters here, and in connection with Epicurus, is that we should not let fear, the fear of death most of all, lead our actions, thoughts and feelings; we should overcome our fears by rationalising them. Perhaps uniquely, death is not just an unknown—as are other things that are unknown at a given moment but could be known in the future. It is unknowable because, as you have noted, no one who dies will actually ever experience their death since the one that one is will no longer be. So, for the Epicureans, the fear of death is irrational and unjustified: no one should fear one’s own death because they will never be able to know what it is to die or to be dead. But this does not hold for the death of others.

We do experience the death of others, and it may well be that this is the only way in which each one of us knows death at all; it may well be that this is the only thing there is to know about death. Wouldn’t this make death knowable after all? If Epicurus is right, and by this I mean that there is no ‘there and then’ or ‘after’ for the one who is dead, anything we think (and imagine or fear) about our death is by analogy. If I were the only one alive, I would not know what it would feel like to be dead (there would be no I), I would not know that I will die, and I would not even know that I died, that I no longer am when I will no longer be. And if this were the case, I would be, as far as I could tell, immortal. But I am not, and I know this because I am not the only one who is or has been alive. I can observe and experience other people’s deaths; hence death, as far as I know it, and I do know this, is always the death of other people (and animals and plants, of course). This holds both for the deaths of those we love and those we do not care about or even know at all. The affection is different in each case, but it is affection, a perception and feeling, nevertheless, even in cases where those that die are bad, seem to not deserve to live, or their death might seem, to them or others, better than the life they could have had. In the Epicurean universe, the foundation of all knowledge is perception and it is from sense-experiences that we proceed to form preconceptions which, combined with feelings of pleasure and pain, allow us to form judgements about, and ultimately know, not only what is evident in the senses, but also what is not directly evident or is non-evident at all – like God, the void, justice. Although not explicitly mentioned in this context, isn’t my death then, albeit non-evident to me, one of the latter? And if indeed it is, then the misconception may be precisely this: we may mistakenly believe that dispelling the fear of death, as a fear of non-existence, not letting it be what drives us in life – as Epicurus and Lucretius advise in order to reach tranquillity of mind – is all it takes to deal with death. But it is not.

In Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Prometheus advises Io, Zeus’ daughter who is terrified and in great suffering, that not to know her future would be better than knowing. Indeed Prometheus’ first gift to human beings was to cure us from the ‘disease’ of being able to foresee our death (which presumably we were able to do previously, and actually we are not too far from being able to do now) – not that we will die, i.e., that we are mortal, but how and when; more specifically, what kind of suffering our death will involve or cause. Prometheus’ cure, as the Chorus prompts him to reveal, consists in planting ‘blind hopes’ in our hearts. What do we, blindly, hope for? One way to think of this is to say we hope to become immortal, to extend our present life so that eventually, with the advancement of medicine and technology, we will not even have to die at all. Another would be to say that we hope there is an afterlife; that we will go to another place, where we will all meet again and live happily ever after. The afterlife will be like this life, only better; Paradise, the Elysian fields, the other place, will be just like this beautiful shore, these blooming fields, only better – without mosquitoes, as I heard a small child describe paradise at a storytelling gathering on a hot summer evening on a Greek island. Plotinus’ version is lovelier: a place that is no place, a time that is no time, a life where no one is born and no one dies, where everything is transparent to everything else, where I look into your eyes and know what you mean, and when you always mean all that you do not even say. This is the life of Intellect, just like this life, only better.

We know death by analogy and then analogies morph into myths. We need these myths in order to be persuaded that something is the case, over and above the philosophical arguments or scientific data that establish something as true or a fact. We need these myths not in order to survive, but in order to keep sane, to live well. Does this mean that we will to live our life as if we were immortal? Alarmingly, Tom Waits resounds in my head singing Brecht: “mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance in keeping its humanity repressed”. What if Prometheus was wrong? What if we were to decline his gift and live our life just as we are? What if, bluntly put, the only difference between those that left for pastures new and those dead, is that the former are alive and the latter are not, precisely because I can no longer experience them, precisely because they will never come back to experience and be experienced? However unlikely, it is still possible, if we so wish, to meet with the living again in this life; to see how much they have changed, how they have been living, what they have become. Although not intersecting, our lives would still go on, develop. Separation is then as much like death as it is not. What if, really, to live as a mortal, is nothing other than coming to terms with the fact, as a fact, that life is – in Bellario’s words of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster – a game ‘that must be lost’? And why then would it be better not to know when or how we will die? Why would the revelation of the circumstances of our death ‘break our spirit’ and drive us, like Io, to insanity? After all, when people are nowadays diagnosed with a life-limiting illness, medics predict and do tell patients how long they have left. But people react differently: for some, this is indeed hard to bear and causes them to fall into depression; but for others such prognosis acts as a motivating force, and the time they have to live becomes the most creative, the most fulfilling of all. For what it’s worth, I feel much better when reading a new book to start from the last chapter.

*

MH: We can only start with the last chapter of a book if and when the whole book has already been written and is ready for the reading. Yet the last chapter of our life has not been written yet. We don’t know how and when we are going to die because there is nothing to know yet. Prometheus’s gift is the openness of the future, without which the future wouldn’t really be a future at all. Hope resides in this openness. If nothing is predetermined, if the future is not just a past in reversal, a past that we are still to experience as present, then there is always a chance, however slight, that things will turn out different, that the doctors may be wrong after all and our supposedly deadly disease won’t kill us within a year, that our execution will be put on hold, that we are miraculously saved from whatever threatens to end our existence at any given time. Perhaps it even leaves room for the hope that, however unlikely it may seem, we might somehow escape the fate that we share with all other living things, and not die at all.

Our own death is, after all, an abstraction. It has no experiential reality. So we do indeed know what dying is only from our experience with the death of other people. But what can we really learn from that experience? Somebody is there, is a part of my world. They can be interacted with. They are fully real, a solid presence, until, one day, they aren’t. One minute they are in this world, and the next minute they are gone for good. Not to a different place, but, as far as we know, to no place at all. There is a material change here, but it is more than just a change, and certainly more than just a material change. Something has happened that should have been impossible because it seems to defy the laws of nature: something has turned into nothing. It is like a conjurer’s disappearance act, except that in this case it is not an act. The thing in question, the person, really does disappear. They have not just disappeared from sight, hidden away through a clever sleight of hand. Instead, they have actually vanished into thin air, leaving nothing behind but a body that quickly decomposes and loses its animal form. Only the hat is left, as it were, but the rabbit is gone, and it won’t come back, although other rabbits might pop out of different hats when new people, new living things, are born, which is just as mysterious, just as utterly incomprehensible as death, which only reverses the event of conception at which something was created out of nothing. How can nothing become something? How can something become nothing?

What the death of other people teaches us is that death is real, at least as far as we are concerned. Whatever has happened to them, they are gone from our world. We may not be able to understand how this is possible, but we know it is happening. And it is not that difficult to imagine other people being gone from our world because our world does not in any way depend on them. They are in this world, but they do not constitute it. Our own death is a very different matter and much harder, perhaps impossible, to understand or to understand the reality of. We can imagine the non-existence of others, but we cannot really imagine our own non-existence. When we try to do so, we always at the same time reaffirm our being, namely as an imagining subject. I can imagine myself to be deprived of all kinds of things, of possessions, abilities, and people, but I cannot imagine myself to be deprived of myself. ‘I am dead’ is not a meaningful proposition, not even when it is uttered in the future tense. Death has no subject. For the same reason, ‘You are dead’ is not a meaningful proposition either. However, ‘he is dead’ or ‘she is dead’ are meaningful propositions, because the ‘he’ or ‘she’ in question is not a subject, but an object of my experience. They were part of my world, and now they are not. I myself, however, will always be part of my world, which is why trying to imagine one’s own non-existence is the same as trying to imagine the end of the world. If I am no longer there, then the world is no longer there for me either. But for me, there is no other world than the world that is there for me, so if I cease to exist that world will also cease to exist. From my perspective, there will never have been a world and never again be a world. But we know from the death of other people that when they die, the world continues to exist, which strongly suggests that when I die, the world will also continue to exist. But if the existence of the world (namely as an object) depends on the continued existence of its subject, then I will continue to exist as long as the world exists. Schopenhauer made that argument, insisting that “the present cannot be lost”, which simply expands Epicurus’s insight that when we are, death is not, and when death is, we are not. This would explain why we never fully believe in our own mortality.

*

PV: It feels like this conversation is heading towards its final chapter. And perhaps this is why it has been so hard for me to write. To complete a conversation, a piece of writing, is in a certain sense the death of it, the admission that the end has come – an irreversible finality, about to turn the present into past. But of course, if everything is left forever incomplete, nothing ever is, in this very sense in which philosophers have thought being to be superior, more real, more meaningful, than becoming. Schopenhauer was one of these philosophers. The world of becoming that he sees is a world of endless suffering, frustration, completely meaningless. Life, my life and yours, are but a dream, an illusion, and so too are my death and your death. The subject that maintains being (or the world as an object) into real existence, is neither you nor I. It is an abstract, universal conception of a subject, a subject outside time, eternal and immortal, objectified into a set of timeless patterns much like the Platonic ideas. Even if that subject (and its object) continued to exist, it wouldn’t follow that you or I would continue to exist or that you or I ever really existed. The only evidence we have of the latter, for Schopenhauer, is that from our internal individual perspective we, and by analogy everything else, can get a glimpse of that non-individual and eternal real being, and that glimpse, that present, is what is real and as such can never be lost. True, one could look at a rose and see the ‘ideal’ – all the roses and all the flowers at once and none in particular – but not this rose, which I now hold in my hands, the rose that grew in my garden and will soon whither and die in my vase. Although equally true, one may find it harder holding onto such view when it comes to human beings. When I look at my mother, my daughter, my friend, I do not see just ‘human being’; their lives and deaths are not just appearances of a being that is elsewhere, up above in some metaphysical sky or hidden in the depths of each one’s individual, particular, and as such illusory, existence safeguarded merely by myself as a point from which they are viewed. Ultimately, one may deliberately want to resist viewing people, roses, the world and the present in such way.

Not fully believing in one’s own mortality seems to me to leave too open the horizon of a future at the expense of shrinking the present merely to a point of contact with the ever-spinning wheel of time. This may in fact resonate with the kind of present that Schopenhauer envisaged when he said that the present is not lost, but even so he too finds fault with the idea of living in anticipation of a never-ending future: such people, he says in the Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life, “go one living ad interim, until at last they die”. The present I want to defend here is a different one: it is a lived presence, a stretched-out present, so to speak, paradoxically able to fit hours or days into its duration. The present can be lost. And it is only the present that can be lost; indeed, more often than not it is lost. The past has already been and the future is never really ours to lose or save. Habit, boredom, anxiety for the future or procrastination, are all reasons why we may not be present in the present and thus turn the present all too quickly into a past.

We started this conversation from our fears about death: your fear of non-existence, my fear of the suffering caused by one’s death to others. The fear of death, whatever form it may take, we agree, is what we need to overcome in order to live and die well. But how? The solution to this problem, if there is a solution, may not be one and the same for all and under every circumstance. In my view, and here we seem to disagree, the solution cannot be to live my life as if there will be no end and hope for some kind of miracle, either in terms of a treatment for a life-limiting illness or, more generally, in terms of the eternal life promised by religions and speculated by science. More promising, albeit perhaps also more challenging, I find the prospect of coming to terms with my death, being fully convinced that my death is as inevitable and as proximate at any given time as that of others. Looking at my rose again; its certain death, the fleeting nature of its existence, makes it all the more beautiful and my paying attention to its image and smell, enjoying it as I write these lines, makes it all the more meaningful. We are not forever. We may find comfort in the idea that this may not be true. But we also tend to forget it, even if we do believe it to be true. We are at constant war with the human condition at the core of which lies our mortality and temporal existence, and it is in this conflict that we often lose our present, the presence of ourselves and of others in the present. Perhaps we focus too much on the suffering and not enough on the abundance of life which is undeniably everywhere around us a compelling force; we fear death so much that we are all too eager to drown life in our desire for more and more. Starting from the last chapter, living one’s life backwards that is, does not necessarily amount to a future that is lived as a past – especially a given past – in reverse. What is given in such conception is that there is an end, a given future if you will, but precisely because of this the present is all that is at stake. There is no ‘more’ or ‘less’ in the present, all is here now and this is also why an absence may be so strongly felt. In the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot writes:

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

‘There will be time’… To live one’s life backwards would be changing the future not to a past, but to a present tense.

*

MH: There will be time, yes, but not necessarily for us because our time can come to an end at any moment, unannounced and sudden. It may also last longer than we had expected, sometimes even longer than we desire. Whatever we may think of the value of Prometheus’ gift, it cannot be refused or returned. The human condition is, for better or worse, marked by both the certainty of death and the uncertainty of its occurrence in time. That it will happen is certain, but hardly ever when, unless it is imminent. But the lived present is indeed an extended one, incorporating change and all that is real of what we call the future and the past.

I am not sure, though, that your conception of that lived present is all that different from Schopenhauer’s idea of an “eternal present”. It is true that Schopenhauer, like many other philosophers before and after him, thought of this ever-changing world, the “world of becoming”, as deficient and somehow not fully real in comparison to the “world of being”, which is supposed to be unchanging and for that very reason more real. Personally, I have never understood that kind of intuition. The very distinction seems misguided. After all, the only world we know of is a world of becoming, where things constantly change and nothing lasts forever, including ourselves, so that becoming is in fact the only kind of being that we can experience or even imagine. Pure, change-free being, is an abstraction and indistinguishable from nothingness. It does not exist and cannot exist. The desire to escape from the world of becoming is, then, ultimately a desire to escape from existence. Death is an integral part of life because life is change. But that also means that there are no endings – no absolute endings anyway – because every ending is also the beginning of something new. Endings are transitions. There are no final chapters. After the game is before the game.

Accordingly, Schopenhauer’s eternal present should not be understood as a timeless present, but as one that lasts through time. It is not the moving image of an unmoving eternity, as Plato would have it, but a moving, or lived, eternity. We take our present with us, through time. You may, however, be right that even in this sense the notion of an eternal present requires us to call into question the ultimate reality of the individual, or more precisely the ultimate reality of the boundaries that we commonly believe separates one individual from another. But perhaps that is not a bad thing. Perhaps it should be questioned. I understand why you would want to hold on to the idea that the individual is real and that there is nothing more real behind it, that the people we know and love and share our life with, and of course we ourselves, are not merely, as you put it, “appearances of a being that is elsewhere”. I am inclined to agree. This rose is real, as real as it gets, and it is real precisely because it is here and now (having its place and its time) and because it will no longer be here tomorrow. Its reality depends on its being this rose and no other. The same goes for you and me. And because we are real, our death is real too. One day we will both be gone, and once we are gone, we are gone for good. This is what you recommend we fully accept and come to grips with lest we lose the present in a fruitless fight against mortality.

Yet you also suggest that we be less preoccupied with our own inescapable mortality and the suffering that comes with it and focus more on “the abundance of life which is undeniably everywhere around us a compelling force.” Now why would we do that? How does that help us to come to terms with death? May not the reason be that we feel our own life extended and continued in all the other life that surrounds us, including the life that was there before us and that will continue to be there after we are gone? There will be time, you said, and I added that there might not be for us. But perhaps that matters less than we commonly suppose. Life does indeed go on without us, but it does go on, and that may be precisely what makes the knowledge of death bearable for us, for the life that goes on is the same life that we find in ourselves. That life was never entirely disconnected from ours in the first place. Our life is shared with other people, other creatures. We all live our own lives, but we also live in each other. The rose in your hand, you say, is beautiful and meaningful at least partly because it only lasts for a short while, and it is. But I wonder if our appreciation of its beauty may not also be informed by our recognition that this rose is one of many and when it dies roses will continue to bloom as they did before, long before this particular rose came into existence and long after its departure. There is discontinuity, but also continuity. What I am trying to get at is not reincarnation. It is more like shared presence or extended identity, a wider conception, or rather experience, of the self that transcends the customary but by no means compellent ontological separation between me and everything else. For those who find joy and solace in the existence of others, death has no (or much less) sting.

*

PV: The present I tried to describe seems to me different from Schopenhauer’s. For one thing, the present I talk about is not eternal: it is a present that can be lost. It is the present one is aware that can be lost; it is the present that, perhaps most likely in retrospect, one realises that was lost. When I read a novel that I really enjoy, time passes so quickly and yet so many pages I manage to read in what seems to be such short a time. When I am bored, time passes slowly and after hours I may realise that what I have read is but a few pages, and what is worse, that I remember none of it, that I carry none of it in my present now. Reading a good novel or an engaging piece of philosophy, falling in love, being happy, experiencing beauty, are not just present moments in time, but moments that we are fully present in the present and our presence in that here and now is really intense. In such cases, the present is not lost but is experienced, enriched. Certainly, these are all just examples of gaining the present, gaining time; and boredom, as I have already mentioned, is just one reason among others for losing it. Another reason, which is what we have been concerned mostly here, is obviously death itself, but also the fear of death. We might not be able to do anything about the former, but there is a lot we can do about the latter.

‘There will be time’ might be a consolation – although I am not at all sure Eliot intended it that way – for those who read in it that there will be a future, be it an indefinite one or one stretching very far away, a broad ‘horizon’ as you previously said. But you are right to remark that it might not be very reassuring since this time may not be really in our future or we may not even wish for it. My suggestion however, was to change the future tense in that verse into a present so that it would read: ‘there is time’. And this time that is now, the present, is the time to seize or lose. Is my suggestion then Horace’s all-pervasive carpe diem, seize or pluck the day? Yes, but combined with his other equally known advice to remember that one is mortal, memento mori. Although the two do not appear together in the same context their link is evident in Ode 1.11: the ‘poet’, Horace, urges young Leuconoe to ‘seize the day’, precisely because this may be the ‘last winter’. Carpe diem alerts us to the danger of losing the present in a futile attempt to gain the future and urges us to pay more attention to the present, make the most of it. But without the constant reminder of our mortality as memento mori prescribes, we would be in danger of living too much in the present – being too frivolous even in Schopenhauer’s book – and live each day as if it were the first, a totally new day to be lived by a new-born self without a world, without a history, without a past. Horace’s poem makes me think again of those whose death is imminent and for whom that limited time is the most creative or fulfilling they have ever had: what if we lived as if we were in that situation? What if we lived as if there were no future, as if there were no tomorrow, as if this day, every day, is not the first but the last? Within the mythological narrative of the story of Prometheus, this would amount to a rejection of his gift.

But this is not an easy thing, and thinking this way may lead one to disengagement from the world, to depression, or insanity, as indeed has done in some cases. It may also feel undesirable: too myopic, too restricted, a claustrophobic world with no room to project, set goals, plan out a life, as it were. Most importantly: even if one were willing to attempt it, to take these risks, would it be possible to live every day, every hour, as if there would be no other? In other words, would it be possible to live continuously present in the present? No. We do waste time; we also fall asleep literally and metaphorically. That this must happen is also part of the human condition. Being mortal and being in time and space are two sides of the same coin, but each creates limitations in two different directions. Coming to terms with our mortality would involve, on the one hand, living our life with the awareness that there is no indefinite future, that at some point in the near future we will cease to exist (at least in the way we know existence to be) and that today may very well be our last day. On the other hand, it would involve living our life with the awareness that we cannot consistently be in love, creative, happy, engaged, present in the present: this would be unrealistic, a misleading and tantalizing expectation. We fall out of love, we experience pain, sorrow; we want to escape, hide away or rest. Keeping these periods of pain or recuperation intact is as important as keeping them at bay. Within this tension, to think that every crisis will be succeeded by better times, that every night’s sleep will awaken us to a fresh morning, that every end is also a new beginning, is indeed a consolation as well, especially for those who, like your younger self, fear non-existence. It does take a lot of strength to not only come to terms with the eventuality of death but also – and even more so but in my opinion for good reason– with the finality of life in each of its stages.

Life is a game that must be lost. If life is such game, it seems to be the only one. Why would one want to play a game that one knows for sure that one will lose? One way to think about it would be precisely to admit that death has such strong a sting that we have made death “the oestrus of life”, as Andreas Embirikos, a Greek surrealist poet, put it. Recall, the death drive and the sex drive, which prompts one to survival, creativity and procreation, go hand in hand in Freud. But despite their appeal, psychoanalytic approaches never fully register with me. Let us consider another way of making sense of it. That I am part of a greater whole, that this rose is one of many is precisely that lively background – not an open horizon, but a beautifully framed landscape – against which I will to appreciate the meaning of my life or the beauty of the rose. Not so much, I think, because after death this life will continue somehow through others, as you have suggested, but because while we are alive our context, history, legacy and the ‘others’ are all alive too in this present. Take the person who is in love as an example: they don’t just experience a connection with their self and the beloved; they experience a connection with the whole world – ‘being on top of the world’ but looking down, seeing within the world. The self, the beloved, the world, they all are beautiful, meaningful, real, now in the present that one gains, amidst all the other presents that do slip away. Treating this day, today, as if it were the last one, prompts us to actively seek such present, to be mindful both of its value and of its precarious nature. Granted that this present cannot be experienced all the time, it nevertheless can be experienced even under the most adverse circumstances, even in the hardest times. And when it is experienced – in different ways and for different reasons for each one of us – it seems to me to be invariably experienced as being rather becoming, which gives to this distinction perhaps a different but more attractive meaning. For, ultimately, I believe this to be the reason why we play this game, life, despite knowing that we will lose in the end, despite knowing that after this game is not before another. ‘If you can’t win a game, change the rules’; we can get it wrong of course, but winning such present, inscribing being onto becoming, may be what life is all about.