Post #48: Behold, a Pale Horse

11 July 2023

Earlier today I read the obituary—my favorite kind, in the Economist—of a Tibetan filmmaker who just died at 53. I had never heard of him before (Pema Tseden), so it didn’t affect me in the sense of a personal loss, though I don’t doubt that the world is a little poorer now. Nor is it news to me that human beings die before they reach their statistical life expectancy, and that a first conspicuous wave seems to strike around fifty (one of my mom’s best friends, a buddy’s dad, Steve Jobs). Congenital factors seem to play a prominent role, and a heavy smoking habit, but at bottom it is the exhaustion of the body announcing itself for the first time in fatal accents and a more systematic and sustained manner.

Having arrived at that age myself, how do I feel about it? Not great, that’s for sure, but the tone of the question has shifted for me in recent years, as symptoms of physical deterioration are beginning to show in ways that make me think of the future with unease. No, I am not ready to make my exit, and I certainly wouldn’t do anything to hasten it; but would a quick and unexpected end (sudden heart failure in the filmmakers case, it seems) really be so much worse than watching yourself decay for decades before the whole tottering structure finally collapses upon itself?

I’m not sure, but I can report that the debate now has two sides in a way it did not when I was younger. Perhaps things will keep going that way gently enough to make the departure easier when the time comes. Beyond that hope, I guess I would prefer to outlive my parents—spare them that much, at least. My girlfriend expects me to live to 120, she says, but she hasn’t seen me at 60 or 70, not to mention 90 or 100. Nor is she considering the enormity of spending seventy years with someone, if that is the plan. (Hers, I mean; I don’t plan anymore, or if I do, it’s for a few weeks ahead, or maybe months, no longer.)

With no children or other major responsibilities to worry about, for now at least, there remains, I suppose, the question of my “life’s work”—though at my age one begins to take a decidedly more sober (and somber) view of one’s erstwhile dreams and aspirations. I still like the translations I’ve done, and the dozen or so academic articles that I’ve put before the public are about as engaging as they can be made for a grand total of ten critical readers with eleven competing agendas. (One softens a little towards the unloveliness of it all when the realization dawns that without these agendas, one’s readership as an obscure scholar would fit into a telephone booth—and even that only where memory lingers of how dearly the awkward contraptions once mattered to the lives and loves of the dinosaurs that roamed the earth before the great digital flood. Yes, Virginia, it is true: the internet really was created and the mobile turn engineered by guys who still dropped pocket change into public phones.)

As for my other offerings, you have the latest and most mature fruit before you. Let’s not delude ourselves: how much of a difference does it really make, even at its best? Not that I am likely to quit from disappointment; writing is what I do best, for better or for worse, and I will keep doing it for my own sake and the possible benefit of whatever little platoon of interested readers I can find. Beyond that, I am not overly optimistic about the prospects for my kind of writing in an age such as ours, as I have said many times already, and I doubt very much that my last thoughts on the threshold will be that I should have done more. It should be enough by the time I am cut off, whenever it may be.

The immediate occasion will be horrible, I fear. Traffic accidents cannot be ruled out, especially here in Bangkok. Not my preferred option, but I would pray for it to be quick at least, if it should come to that, and leave me fully dead, not only half. Heart failure or stroke, there’s a very good chance of that in my family. Not a pleasant prospect, but then what exit option is a delight to behold? Cancer and the whole abominable panoply of degenerative diseases: I’d prefer the quick way out, one that gives me no chance to weaken in my resolve and linger for nothing but the blind will to live. Would I hasten things along if it came to that? If I found the courage to do so, I suppose; but that wouldn’t be easy, and it’s hard even to think about seriously.

What about death itself, as opposed to the last steps towards it? I don’t much worry about rebirth, or eternal punishments and rewards, if that’s what you are wondering. If I could get a good answer to the following question, I might reconsider: if our planet were struck by a meteor big enough to wipe out all life at once, where would all the broken threads get reconnected? Elsewhere in the universe, or maybe in an alternate one? Name it, then, if you are sure enough to posit its existence. To me it all sounds far too conjectural, even if the Teaching is unambiguous in making rebirth a central pillar of the Buddhist edifice. It may have been adapted, some would argue, from tenets that could be taken for granted in the Buddha’s day, but not in ours (Schopenhauer called belief in some such migration of life-streams the ancestral faith of all mankind). I know nothing of these higher dimensions and until they are revealed to me, which I do not expect to happen in this lifetime, my mind won’t stretch further than a cold and skeptical agnosticism.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead looks to me like one of the more credible manuals on the metaphysics of dying that we’ve got. The picture it paints of the inner storms that will be unleashed when the consciousness falls apart does not make for heartening reading, but I have no idea what to make of it. The reports from survivors of near-death experiences sound much more encouraging and strike me as more probable on the whole, but of course they never go further than the antechambers of Hades; from the main building where the Lord of Death resides and rules, no mortal comes back alive, that is the whole point.

A common theme in these eyewitness reports, as in the more traditional accounts, is that the departing spirit will be expected to give an account of his or her doings on Earth. Perhaps these are no more than the last echoes of mythical religious ideas, but I would not be at all surprised if I were indeed asked (or compelled to ask myself) whether I had done enough to live, love, and learn given the opportunities that have presented themselves to me. If there is one constellation to steer by in our world, it is these three stars in the night.

At last, when the lights really do go out, will they be reignited again, somehow, somewhere? I have no idea, but apart from the fact that we would for the most part like them to be, why should they? Do we not experience every night an extinction that should accustom us to the idea that such things are possible? What if we simply did not wake up again from dreamless sleep? Or if you have ever been put under for an operation and it knocked you out completely, why would you expect things to go so very differently if the good doctors had gotten the dosage wrong, or if for some other unfortunate reason you failed to come back?

I would appreciate a few more good years, certainly, but when I look at just how brutal the ravages become after 50, 60, and 70 especially, I am no longer so sure how many decades I would be disposed to add, if it were up to me. My perspective may change along the way, of course: people report remarkably high levels of personal happiness after 60 and 70, as I’ve mentioned in my post on ageing (#29). Maybe I will turn out to be among them and laugh at my current apprehensions one day, as those of a greenhorn at the game. Perhaps with less and less self in the mix, it will all look a lot more amusing eventually—a cosmic dance, as has been said, or a divine jest that calls for laughter, not tears. It’s possible, though from my vantage point today I would still expect the tears to predominate.

There should be consolation in the thought that at least Zorba’s “full catastrophe” has its redeeming moments and that, at the very least, it does not need to be endured for very long. And if some kind of rebirth were in store for us after all, we would not be aware of the continuity anyway—so this life will come to an end no matter what. I cannot pretend to be very comfortable thinking about these things, but I guess I can bear to do so at least occasionally. For the rest, I try to keep my focus on the present dispensation, not what may or may not come after, and as for any continuation, I hold with Thoreau’s pronouncement when he died at 44 of tuberculosis (see also Post #1): “One life at a time.”

What my own last words should or will be, who knows. But if I could wish for something from today’s vantage point, it would come in two parts: “It was good, despite the bad parts. And now it is, truly, enough.”

(To the memory of Julien Cota and Richard Meech.)