Today I talked with a client about mortality and how we reflexively seek to protect ourselves from the dread and fear evoked by death. I talked with another client about how focusing on the immediate present--being "in the moment"--is helping him navigate a profound personal and professional transition. And tonight, reflecting on these conversations, I was reminded of a passage from Marcus Aurelius that I find both bracing and comforting:
Even were you to live three thousand years or thrice ten thousand, remember that no one loses any other life than this which he is living, nor lives any other than this which he is losing. Thus the longest and the shortest come to the same thing. For the present is equal for all, and what is passing is therefore equal: thus what is being lost is proved to be barely a moment. For a man could lose neither past nor future; how can one rob him of what he has not got? Always remember, then, these two things: one, that all things from everlasting are of the same kind, and are in rotation; and it matters nothing whether it be for a hundred years or for two hundred years or for an infinite time that a man shall behold the same spectacle; the other, that the longest-lived and the soonest to die have an equal loss; for it is the present alone of which either will be deprived, since (as we saw) this is all he has, and a man does not lose what he has not got. [1]
I had been thinking along these lines well before the conversations with my clients today. I just turned 45, and while I'm physically active I feel the limitations of age, and I can't do everything I want to do. More seriously, Amy recently had a health issue that turned out to be manageable through medication but which gave us a scare until it was diagnosed. So I've been wrestling with my own perspective on mortality, and my own feelings of dread and fear.
In the "unpublished jottings" that close Christopher Hitchens' posthumous book Mortality he includes this brief note: "Larkin good on fear in 'Aubade,' with implied reproof to Hume and Lucretius for their stoicism. Fair enough in one way: atheists ought not to be offering consolation either." [2] Hitchens, who wrote these lines while dying of cancer, is referring to Philip Larkin's haunting poem from 1977, which he had begun and set aside three years earlier, returning to it only upon the death of his mother. The short verse includes the following stanza:
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round. [3]
Hitchens and Larkin take issue with stoicism and its seemingly inhuman implication that our fear of death is so foolish and irrational that it should be easily surmounted. I haven't read Hume or Lucretius, so I can't characterize their perspective, but I don't think that's an accurate description of Aurelius' view. In the introduction to the Oxford edition of the Meditations, classics scholar R. B. Rutherford emphasizes that "Marcus was writing for himself, and seems to have had no thought of making his reflections available to a wider audience in his own lifetime or thereafter... At the end of the day, the emperor would record a few reflections and admonish himself to observe certain precepts and ethical rules which he might have neglected in the course of the day." [4] Aurelius wasn't rebuking us for our irrational fear of death; he was encouraging himself to be brave.
At times like this I find the above passage from the Meditations comforting because I accept Aurelius' assertion that "the longest-lived and the soonest to die have an equal loss." I may well live another 45 years, and I may die tomorrow, and in both cases I'll lose the exact same thing: the present moment. And I find this passage equally bracing because, having accepted this assertion, I have to acknowledge that the present moment, this moment, is all I truly have. I can I can sit back and let it pass by, as I so often do, or I can step forward and do something meaningful with it.
Footnotes
[1] Meditations, Book II, Chapter 14 (Marcus Aurelius)
[2] Mortality, page 92 (Christopher Hitchens, 2012)
[3] "Aubade" (Philip Larkin, 1977)
[4] Meditations, pages ix-x.
Photo by Martin Fisch.
