We are born into the certainty of our eventual death. Every now and then, something – maybe an encounter with a robin's egg, maybe a poem – strikes us with the terrifying, awe-inspiring wonder of life, your luck against the great cosmic odds of nothingness. But accompanying the fear is always a partial sadness that one day the light of consciousness will be extinguished. It is a gift that is hard to grasp, this loss of life. It's also a joyous pleasure, if we're physical enough to tap into a cosmic vision that doesn't come naturally to us tiny, Earth-bound bipeds with self-importance.
Think about this.
For each of us, one thing is true: If any variable had ever been so subtly different – your parents got married on a different day or in a different place, if the universe had started to cool for a fraction of a second immediately after the Big Bang, you wouldn't exist as some constellation of atoms adjusting to the consciousness that makes you who you are. Because chance plays such a dice with the whole world, and because the die dictates that most of the forces and things have never been lucky enough to meet in this world of lost life, it is a wonderful right to die, in some deep and effective sense – which shows the right to live. Therefore, to cry about death is to cry about our luck, because any indifference to the possibility of death is to deny the impossible miracle of life, the desire to have nothing to do with the dying – nothing to share in the good, bitter life.
It is easy to bend the intuitive mind to this correct but counterintuitive idea while walking through a cemetery in the height of summer. Doing this very thing while thinking these very thoughts, I was reminded of a passage from one of the most lucid and lens-removing books written since Darwin— Unraveling the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and Fantastic Longing (public library) opinionated and often controversial (which is the social end of every opinion) British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.
A civilization after Marcus Aurelius celebrated death as the key to living fully, half a millennium after Montaigne realized that “to say that we shall not be alive a hundred years from now, is as foolish as to regret that we did not exist a hundred years ago,” and a scientific age after Darwin pondered the meaning of death after the death of his beloved daughter, Dawkin wrote:
We will die, and that makes us lucky. Most people will never die because they will never be born. The people who might be here in my place but who will never actually see the light of the sun are more than grains of sand in Arabia. Surely those unborn ghosts include poets greater than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of people who might be allowed for by our DNA vastly exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these surprising problems, you and I, in our common sense, exist. We lucky few, who won the birth lottery no matter what, how dare we complain about our inevitable return to that old state from which the majority never left?
Featuring astrologer and poet Rebecca Elson “Medicines to fight the fear of death,” Nick Cave on grief at the heart of life, and Christopher Hitchens on how we live and die, then re-examine the science of how you really live, examined through the lens of trees and Alan Turing.
