Want to know the secret to living...like, REALLY living?
It has a lot to do with facing death. This is Chapter 8 in the Book Serialisation.
Right, so the next chapter in the Book Serialisation project continues directly from last week’s instalment that discusses whether collapse means we’re all going to die. You can catch up here. Today we dig into what happens if we get honest about what is ending. It’s a mixed bag of boons: We benefit from awe, we grow from the grief and we (could) land somewhere very very sweet.
You’re new here? You can start at the beginning and navigate around using this Table of Contents if you like.
The audio version is at the bottom, available only to subscribers. Ditto the conversation in the comments section where we workshop things together.
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LIVE
“Think of yourself as dead.
You have lived your life.
Now take what’s left and live it properly.”
- Marcus Aurelius
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Once upon a time, the Greek goddess Persephone was abducted to the Underworld by Hades, god of Death. Hades had grand plans to bind Persephone to the Underworld by forcing her to eat its food. He presented her with three choices. She could choose the sweet ambrosia, which was laced with a dose of melancholy that leads those who eat it to resent life. The second choice was nectar, which dulls memories of life. Hades banked on Persephone picking one of the two and thusly wedding herself to death, or a numb, avoidant engagement with it.
But he threw in a third option, for fun - a bitter pomegranate, whose seeds awaken one to the horror of death but also provoke a restless longing for life.
Persephone chose to eat the pomegranate and, in so doing, boldly face the anguish and pain of death in exchange for the chance to also live. Like, really live.
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When we truly contemplate the end or disappearance of a thing, we must also contemplate the worth of the thing itself. When we sit with death (whether it be our own death, the death of humanity or the death of the “old normal”, per last chapter), we necessarily ask, “What is life?” and “What does it mean to live a good life?” And so, as philosophers and spiritualists from Seneca to Simone Weil have told us, to face death is to learn how to live. Not to merely exist, like, I dunno, an amoeba.
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You might like to think of the cancer patient who has just been given a six-month prognosis. She is finally able to cast aside the irrelevancies that bogged her down in a dumb daily grind and to instead get on with what matters. Palliative care nurses tell us the top regrets of the dying are all to do with having received this crucial memo too late, denying them a life lived no holds barred.
Surely, then, the best ever life hack going around is to get the memo now and not wait for the emergency or death knell that prods us into an awakening and reckoning. It’s to face our death (and the potential death of humanity, and the death of our old ways) now so that we can live now without the regrets! As Albert Camus puts it in The Rebel, the whole of life is an emergency in the sense it could end at any moment.
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This is the gift that collapse presents - it brings us face to face with the emergency now. It sticks the memo to our forehead.
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When I spoke to the death walker and elder Stephen Jenkinson on Wild some time back he told me that our civilisation’s biggest challenge is to die well. To die well? Stephen says this simply entails facing the truth, horror, and unfathomability of death and of something ending. To allow it to be and not deny it. Nothing more.
You can listen to our podcast chat together here:
French Renaissance writer Michel de Montaigne, who holed himself up in a tower in the French countryside to learn how to die well, argued that this process involves talking and reading – philosophising - about death incessantly. He went as far as suggesting we dig our own graves. The idea is that the practice of memento mori (remembering your death) “premeditates adversity”. You sit in the discomfort of the idea of death as often as possible and, then, when the real thing presents, you’ve removed much of the sting.
Picking up on this urgency to live, Seneca wrote in How to Die (a far cheerier read than indicated on the packet): “Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day.”
Marcus Aurelius, similarly, wrote, “Let each thing you would do, say, or intend, be like that of a dying person.” Which, ultimately, we always-already are, no?
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During that liminal time between the two World Wars that we discussed here, Franz Kafka wrote a love letter to his muse Milena wishing for the end of the world so that he could live fully:
Dear Milena,
I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna, and say: ‘Come with me. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.’ Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have any time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow….
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Very literally as Kafka was lamenting a held-back life to Milena (in that same liminal year), the German poet Rilke wrote a letter to the Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy1:
“Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love… Life always says Yes and No simultaneously. Death (I implore you to believe) is the true Yea-sayer. It stands before eternity and says only: Yes.”
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Oh, goodness yes! Yes, death screams yes! It urges us to join nature. To join love! For this is all there is. It’s everything there is, in final washups.