Immortality

Over at Andrew Sullivan’s blog there is a discussion going concerning atheism and the fear of death that I’ve been really fascinated by. Andrew set the whole thing off by asking Kevin Drum, who describes himself as an atheist, what he thinks happens when we die, and how he deals with that emotionally. Drum, and many, many other readers, responded that they think we die, full stop, and that they deal with that (mostly) just fine. Not that they’re exactly happy with it, of course. Most emphasized the importance of this life and over each individual moment; others argued that immortality was either incoherent, wishful thinking, or something that we shouldn’t really desire – an interminable boredom, for instance.

It’s surely a matter of temperament, but I find myself so wholly obsessed with the idea of death that at times it seems to me that nothing else really matters. In a way it’s pathological. It’s what attracts me to literature and philosophy, the attempt to do battle with death, to find a way around it, to face it down, look it at squarely, get our heads around it. Several of Sullivan’s readers have quoted the famous line: “to philosophize is to learn how to die,” and I’m sympathetic to that. So I thought I’d try to organize my rather scattered and disjointed thoughts regarding death and the afterlife, since I find myself in such a radically different place from Sullivan’s readers (and to some extent from Sullivan himself).

Unlike Sullivan’s readers, I find the idea of oblivion devastating. It isn’t just that it means I, as a conscious being, will cease to exist (a concept I find almost impossible to even grasp), and that all my friends and loved ones will one day face the same end. It isn’t only that it renders meaningless the simple banalities we comfort ourselves with when we lose a loved one: “they’re looking down on us,” or “they’re in a better place,” or “they’re always with you.” To lose forever, to let go, has never been easy for me. In fact, it’s been downright impossible. But it isn’t only that aspect of death that terrifies me. We don’t need immortality only to salve the wounds of loss.

I think a key aspect of immortality’s appeal (at least to me) is that it makes possible a kind of Justice. I was reading a story the other day about a little boy, five years old, who had recently died of leukemia. Events like these, I have always felt, present a perhaps unanswerable challenge to the notion of a God perfect in love and power. But they are all the more tragic, unbearably so in my case, bereft of any kind of immortality, any further existence, any retribution. Even as they come close to fatally undermining the whole edifice of faith, they seem to make it that much more necessary. It was things like these that gave birth to faith in the first place, I think. There are lives that seem touched from the start by unutterable suffering, and those are the lives that heaven was made for.

Regarding the notions that immortality is absurd, or that it we wouldn’t want it if we could have it, I think those views are mistaken. I’ve always thought this poem captured my vision of the afterlife best:

There is no dusk to be,
There is no dawn that was,
Only there’s now, and now,
And the wind in the grass.

Days I remember of
Now in my heart, are now;
Days that I dream will bloom
White the peach bough.

Dying shall never be
Now in the windy grass;
Now under shooken leaves
Death never was.

I’ve often thought that eternity is the answer to the question “what is the measure of a moment?” People often view immortality as though it were a succession of moments, the way our lives progress when we’re alive, and viewed that way it would seem to be a kind of hell. But I think that eternity is a timeless now, a moment stretched to its limit. I know somewhere in here there is a philosophy of time that needs constructing: I really feel that time itself may be an illusion, and that that realization is the key to the whole thing. I have trouble formulating it in a way that makes sense even to myself, but somehow I think that if we realized that each moment of our lives was infinite, we’d somehow already be living forever. Kind of a Buddhist thought, that. All our joy would be eternal: I have often felt, for fleeting moments, a kind of delirious happiness, as though my life were, for that instant, limitless and timeless. I think immortality would be like that. But I think, too, that our suffering might also be with us now and forever, but that, under the aspect of eternity, stretched to endlessness, it might look, and feel, like an ecstatic joy. That the two would be the same thing. And that that’s the answer to suffering in our world. I can’t really describe it. Maybe one day I’ll be able to.

Anyway, I’ve rambled on long enough. It’s the kind of thing that keeps me up nights. I haven’t made much headway in making myself clear, or even sensible, but I’ll keep trying.

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