We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?

I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.

It is hard work to fill one’s life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here.

― Chaim Potok, The Chosen

The sudden sight of you is like a one-two punch in the stomach;
A double insult, once to my constitution and once to my pride.
I swore I wouldn’t write a word for you, my words were wasted too often before,
But that punch in the gut doubled me up, and the words just came out,
Spilling onto this page like children rushing from the school gates
Filled with nothing but enthusiasm for the summer evening stretched ahead.
Here’s the thing: I knew I was going to see you, I knew I’d feel this way,
But every time you open your eyes upon me, every time you smile that smile,
I’m caught unawares, I’m caught on the corner, I’m blindsided by that old truck,
And as I kneel in the road, checking my bones for breaks, I look up,
Try to catch sight of the number on the plate on the truck that just struck,
But I already know how it reads, I already know that it has only one word:
Love. And I’ll write that one word for you, I’ll write it down in my notebook
Every day until the pages fall like leaves in autumn, every day until the night
Draws a curtain across our drama, until the notebook is filled with nothing but
Love. I’ll take the pages one-by-one, and pop them in my mouth like gum,
Swallowing them whole while they’re still fresh, ink still wet on the page,
The juice of the fruit coating my throat, filling my stomach with pulp
Until I’m satisfied. Then you’ll call, and I’ll meet you by the bus stop,
And the moment that you open your eyes upon me, I’ll feel that punch in the gut,
And I’ll double up, I’ll double up joyfully – I’ll triple up if you ask nice –
As long as all the words come flooding out, and you see that all the words are
Love. You were never so embarrassed as you are now, embarrassed by my
Inappropriate smile, my adolescent eagerness, my lack of self-control,
Wiping the words away from my mouth and waiting for you to pick me up
Until finally you give in, haul me to my feet, and brush off the dirt of the day.
You’ll need to get your hands dirty if you want to play with me,
Though I know you hate dirt; you want things tidy, you like all your toys
Placed back in neat lines in the cupboard at the end of the day.
I’m afraid you’ll take all the leaves I’ve laid at your feet – all that mess! –
Sweep them into a mountainous pile, a colossus of autumn, and take a match,
Watching as the smoke rises in a column of forgiveness, sending a signal,
A smoke signal to all the other indians & cowboys & pirates & gangsters of
Love, that another of their number has fallen, and won’t be playing any more.
Fear is just an act, though; I’m not really afraid of you burning my love notes;
I’m just afraid that one day you won’t punch me in the stomach any more.

-March 2013

You eat words,
Snapping and crunching
Until only the letters are left,
Hanging from your chin like spittle,
Or a necklace of spikes and spines and spills
Threaded together to make my efforts look like laughter
On the empty page; a silent kind of laughter
Enjoyed only by you, my great enemy,
The one thing I can’t kill.
Spitting and hissing,
I back down.

Grendel II:

You eat words,
Snapping and crunching
Until only the letters are left,
Hanging from your chin like spittle,
Or a necklace of spikes and spines and spills
Threaded together to make my efforts look like laughter
On the empty page; a silent kind of laughter
Enjoyed only by you, my great enemy,
The one thing I must kill.
Shaking and shouting,
I close in.

- January 2013

This post isn’t meant to be depressing, but you’ll probably find it a little depressing. You’ll find it depressing because by nature and nurture you are inclined to avoid thinking about death as nothing better than a curse, a cross that humanity must bear.

Stop for a moment. Ask yourself: is that what I really believe, or is it just what I’ve been told? Is the idea of a cross that humanity must bear a reasonable belief, or is it just the legacy of a religion that tried to take the sting of death away by putting something even worse in its place?

One of the things that we’ve lost is a way of dealing with death in a meaningful way. I don’t care that we’ve lost the religious beliefs that helped us to deal with death by imagining that it wasn’t the end, but that we’ve lost the rituals that went along with those beliefs.

Rituals are important, but you can’t create rituals out of thin air.¹ Once you’ve lost the religious beliefs, death becomes utterly terrifying, and once you’ve lost the rituals, you no longer have the tools to deal with your terror. Terror becomes your only response.

You should always face your demons down, you should always spit in the face of fear. Some people go in the wrong direction, however, and think of death as a tyrant to be overthrown.² Unfortunately this is also a legacy of religious thought – death as the last enemy – rather than a rational response.

So maybe you shouldn’t anthropomorphise death, pretty as she might be. I’m in love with narrative. Treating your life as if it was a story that you’re telling is the best way to live, and death is the full stop at the end of the last sentence of the story; the story’s not complete without it, but it’s not the point of the story.

That might not work for you, and there’s another way to think about this. Presumably you believe that life has value, but where does that value come from? Value comes from scarcity: if we have an unlimited supply of something, we don’t place much value on it.

Think of air. We don’t usually think of air, because there’s so damn much of it, and so we don’t value it. Take away somebody’s air supply while maintaining the same level of demand, however, and its value to them goes through the roof. The same goes for pretty much anything.

If we manage to eliminate death, then our supply of life would become infinite, and it would be worth nothing. That doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t enjoy life, although hedonic adaptation³ suggests that we would enjoy it precisely as much as we currently enjoy life.

It would however mean that the joy we take in this sunset, or that friendship, would be less than it would be if we knew that we only had a certain number of sunsets in our time, or that our friendship would not last forever. This is the curious paradox of immortality: not boredom but banality.

Raging against death is a war without the possibility of a real victory; indeed, the very idea of victory becomes meaningless. It might make you feel better about yourself – reassuring you that at least you’re doing something – but it’s no more reasonable than the religious response.

By all means we should seek to extend peoples’ lives, but more importantly we should seek to improve their quality of life. And it’s here that death plays its role, because it’s only because of death that we are able place any value on life in the first place. Embrace death; although not as a lover.

1. Although some people try very hard, as you can see in this Solstice Eve Book of Rituals [pdf]
2. To be fair, I’ m deliberately mischaracterising Bostrom’s argument, which is actually against senescence and not death. However his line of thinking fits right in with the anti-death tendency in rationalist circles, best described by Yudkowsky in his elegy for his brother.
3. More in Hedonic Adaptation to Positive and Negative Experiences [pdf].

                                “When you
Put away your glass into its box,
I’ll still be here; and when your fate
Reaches the same wooden ends,
Taken to rest by six strong friends,
My stars will continue to hesitate,
Eyelike blinking in their sky.
Maybe one of yours will look up
The same time one of mine looks down.
Their gaze will meet and hold;
Something will pass between them
Before they both go on their way,
Yours tracking across snow to home,
Mine spinning across space to end.”

Revelations such as these bring me out
Night after night, month after month,
Year after year – however long it takes –
My glass in its wooden box by my side
Like a faithful dog in dark woods.
Opening your eyes is never so simple
As you imagine or expect; the question
Asks itself of the world, and the world?
The world answers in its own time,
Be it nights, or months or years, or never;
So sit with me, and while we wait,
We’ll talk of other things that matter.

Early draft (Belgrade, December 2012)

The Carina Nebula, ESO/T. Preibisch

(December 2012, Belgrade)

It starts with the heart, as all things start with the heart,
A heart bruised until it’s become nothing but the bruise,
And beaten until it beats no more. When the music stops,

The dance stops too. The body swings from side to side;
Nothing keeping it moving except sheer force of habit.
Bodies walking through the crowd, not recognising life.

Slowly but surely the heart eats the body, starting with
The most profitable parts: stomach, gut, lining and liver,
Moving on to other organs as soon as the time is right.

Death comes at you unexpectedly, from the inside out.
That’s the death she tastes on my tongue, the sour bite;
Already dead on the inside, and waiting to finally fall.

It’s oh! A cottonmouth kiss that gets under her skin,
Plants doubts like seeds in the dark soil of her soul,
Grows whether she wants them or not, until they bloom.

She tells me suddenly she tastes death on my tongue.
Somehow I know this already, but it’s the last thing I know.
The music stops; the dance stops; and finally I can fall.

What do you say when she tells you about the taste?
That’s right – you say nothing – for what can you say,
When even the words in your mouth taste of death?

Mouth zippered shut tight, eyes squeezed against night,
Still hearing her talking, somewhere beside you, still
Moving the body from side to side until you finally fall.

(November 2012, Belgrade)

I’m not a leader. I am, above all, in no way comparable to Gandhi, who was an ascetic. I love the world’s abundance of ordinary pleasures. And he was a leader. I have neither the character nor the abilities required for leadership. And I want no followers. If I looked back and saw myself being followed, my only wish would be to escape. I am a mostly solitary man, always in need of quiet, who has written some essays inviting, not converts or followers, but honest judgment…

In fact, Madhu, what we both want to happen—a counter movement to greed and waste and the dominance of corporations—is already happening. It is happening simply because a lot of people have seen things needing to be done and are doing them. They are at work without grants, without official instruction or permission, and mostly unnoticed by the politicians and the news industry. Eventually this movement will have political powers which will be in some ways regrettable. I hope it will have the sense and strength to remain locally oriented, and to resist the simplification and corruption that will come with power.

This movement involves a lot of people—as I know—who have never read a word I’ve written, who don’t know my name. And it would be happening now, for the same reasons, if I had never written a word. It would be happening because the justifications of individual and corporate greed are now exhausted, and better ways are available. The better ways will be helped along, as we know, by large historical forces such as rising energy costs, rising ecological and social costs, and the inability of governments, large institutions, and corporations to respond effectively.

- Wendell Berry, A Quieter Life Now

I run through fire

“I have tasted death, Ziller. When my twin and I merged, we were close enough to the ship being destroyed to maintain a real-time link to the substrate of the Mind within as it was torn apart by the tidal forces produced by a line gun. It was over in a micro-second, but we felt it die bit by bit, area by distorted area, memory by disappearing memory, all kept going until the absolute bitter end by the ingenuity of Mind design, falling back, stepping down, closing off and retreating and regrouping and compressing and abandoning and abstracting and finessing, always trying by whatever means possible to keep its personality, its soul intact until there was nothing remaining to sacrifice, nowhere else to go and no survival strategies left to apply. It leaked away to nothingness in the end, pulled to pieces until it just dissolved into a mist of sub-atomic particles and the energy of chaos. The last two coherent things it held onto were its name and the need to maintain the link that communicated all that was happening to it, from it, to us. We experienced everything it experienced; all its bewilderment and terror, each iota of anger and pride, every last nuance of grief and anguish. We died with it; it was us and we were it.”

- Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward

And i am not burnt

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

- T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

But soon i must halt

“He grows disenchanted with the intellect, disenchanted with ideas, disenchanted with consciousness at the intellect, disenchanted with contact at the intellect. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the intellect, experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain: He grows disenchanted with that too. Disenchanted, he becomes dispassionate. Through dispassion, he is fully released. With full release, there is the knowledge, ‘Fully released.’ He discerns that ‘Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.’”

- Ādittapariyāya Sutta

I’ve been stuck with so many swords,
It’s a miracle that I’m still standing;
I guess that makes me a walking miracle.
Am I a lonely soldier on the battlefield,
or a child amongst his worn-out toys?

In the blink of an eye, you lost track of me
As a snake sloughs its skin, leaving it for dust,
And I want to say: if you could see inside
This arrow-stricken heart that I carry with me,
You would never have turned away.

But I don’t burn as bright as I once did –
One too many blows has cracked my casing –
And you looked away for a single second.
A second is all it takes for a battle to be lost,
Even if you’re the last man standing.

My weapons are words that never won a battle yet;
My words are tools that can’t fix what’s broken.
I’m lost, I’m tired, I’m cold, I’m bruised,
I’m aiming for greatness as I wait for you.
Now battle’s over, I suppose I’ll sit here and wait.

Of course I wait for you.