And Death Shall Have Its Dominion

by Theodore Dalrymple (December 2015)

No longer. I can do only a fraction of what I once did if not with ease, then at least with very quick recovery from any tiredness. Nowadays I always take a siesta, for the hour after sleep is my best time for work and a siesta gives me two such hours a day rather than only one. In any case, I can hardly keep my eyes open after lunch.

The sleep from which I regret having woken is not just oblivion, though in retrospect I enjoyed the oblivion too. There is an oneiric period between sleeping and waking in which a stream of interesting images effortlessly passes before me, not always pleasant but never dull, which I am reluctant to lose, shorten or interrupt: so reluctant, in fact, that by an effort of will I can refuse to wake fully and thereby keep it going. Eventually, however, full consciousness makes its claims and cannot be denied. I wake and, much to my regret, resume my life.

It is not that my life is miserable, or without pleasures and interests. But, for the reasons cited above, they are bought at an increasing cost, at a cost that I know can only increase further. And anticipation is three quarters of dysphoria.

By contrast, my oneiric state is delicious, even when the images that come to me on what seems very much like a cinema screen are mildly disturbing. The mind – or at least my mind – seeks interest much more than it seeks pleasure: or rather interest is its pleasure, so that the disturbing does not truly disturb me. And all this for free, not only in the financial sense but free of the expenditure of energy.

Most minds are not very enquiring, however, and accept as given the world in which they find themselves. The more exciting the distraction, the more banal and uninteresting the real world: to whose disenchantment the solution is either more distraction or an attempt to make the real world as exciting as the virtual. I suspect that many people do the most transparently self-destructive things in an attempt to make the real world resemble the virtual world more closely. Self-destruction, alas, is seldom destructive of the self alone: it usually takes other people down with it, for even the anchorite in the Syrian desert, subsisting on wild honey and bitter herbs, may have relatives living who care for him.

In Ibiza, a Balearic island much favoured by European youth (not the least privileged) as a holiday destination, the two largest nightclubs, vast as stadiums, were called Amnesia and Manumission, both names implying the desire for release into a prolonged oneiric state. The slavery implied by the name Manumission is the slavery of consciousness, not that of whips and scourges. As for the desired amnesia of Amnesia, it is not just for a few selected events from the past, but a state in which one moment is completely disconnected from the next, for only thus can consciousness be escaped, with its nagging insistence on cause and effect, good and bad, beauty and ugliness, happiness and misery.

I have no solution to any of this (if, indeed, it there a problem to be solved). Nor can I claim to be completely different myself from the mass of humanity, with my regret that I emerge from my oneiric state into the world of socks and tied shoelaces. Indeed, much of my conscious activity is an attempt at distraction, to lose myself so that I am no longer aware of the sock and shoelace world. Man is not so much a problem-solving animal as a problem-creating one. He creates problems in order to distract himself from the boredom of ordinary existence where the continuation of that existence is no longer dependent upon his own efforts. The Haitian peasants (who know whereof they speak) say that behind mountains are more mountains: in other words, behind problems there are more problems, and this is as well for creatures such as we. The problemlessness of a problemless world would itself be a problem (perhaps the largest of all): therefore there can be no problemless world. Heaven is therefore impossible to imagine for earthbound creatures – at best it would be a realm of endless distraction, boring in the end – whereas Hell is all too easy to imagine in a thousand different incarnations. (An anthology of people’s imagined Hells would make a very interesting and, I have little doubt, amusing book.)

Death will, of course, release us all of the obligation to fill our time somehow or other. But the notion of oblivion is a difficult one. Some philosophers have argued that there should be nothing difficult about it because future oblivion will only be the same as that before we were born (or had some semblance of continuous memory), and with that we have no problem. But I do not think this is quite right. The fact that we have existed and do still exist alters everything for us. The only oblivion of which we have actual experience is that of sleep, and we have experience of it only because we wake afterwards: in other words, all our oblivions hitherto have been temporary and capable of being experienced.

When I try to think of my future non-existence, I am nevertheless aware, Descartes-like, that I am thinking about it: therefore I have not imagined my non-existence. I know that to be non-existent is not like being anything, but so long as I imagine oblivion, I am, I exist. The analogy of sleep, death’s counterfeit, is false. The oblivion of sleep is not comparable to that of death because it is temporary (which is why Shakespeare calls sleep a counterfeit of death and not a copy, or an analogy, or a pale imitation of it). Religious people believe that death is not final, perhaps, but the proof of this is lacking. If we were sure, to mourn the dead (at least those whom we believe to have merited the Kingdom of Heaven) would be selfish and mean-spirited, in so far as it would be to lament their future happiness and to count it of less importance than our own loss. No doubt some have believed strongly enough not to mourn the death of their loved ones but not, I suspect, very many as a proportion of the whole.

I cannot imagine my permanent oblivion, but that does not mean to say that it is not coming. As to the process of dying, I admit to a rather strange attitude towards it: I look forward to it with a certain clinical interest. My only regret is that I shall not be able to make use of the experience or to describe it in writing, for death is the country from which no foreign correspondent files (unless you are Spiritualist). It is true that I have on more than one occasion been nigh unto death, but a miss is as good as a nigh. Where death is concerned, we must accept no substitutes as genuine or authentic. A near death experience is not the experience of actually dying. 

Of course I don’t want a lingering, painful death. Rather I want a good death, a kind of graceful decline that gives me time to wind up my affairs and say my farewells to a few people. The sudden death, the dropping dead that is unexpected in the individual case but statistically likely, is another good way to go, though not perhaps so good for the friends and what the Victorians on their tombstones called the relict.

A few years ago (actually, thirteen), I saw an exhibition of deathbed photographs at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, called Le Dernier portrait, the Last Portrait. It was moving, not morbid. Men and women, famous or unknown, lay on their deathbeds either clutching a bouquet of flowers, or with flowers strewn on their immaculate white linen. They were pictures of peace and dignity. I should like to die like that, but in all probability I will die attached to machines and with tubes stuck in me, after which the screens will be drawn round so that I do not upset the others. I will die when the beep stops.

 

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Out Into the Beautiful World from New English Review Press.

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