Healthy Animal Insensibility

“I felt no trace whatever of fear; it was pure delight and welcome.” William James, on the infamous morning of April 18, 1906, woke to a real earthquake, his first. He was visiting Stanford University, thirty miles below San Francisco. A number of the brick dormitories and other campus buildings collapsed, though James was unharmed. Fascinated, he traveled into the city where he spent all day touring the rubble and watching the progress of the fire.

James was impressed by the general lack of histrionics. Survivors survived and made little fuss about it. The dead made no fuss at all. What particularly interested him was the strange vigor and excitement that he – and so many others – reported feeling. It was out of place, but undeniable. “Mental pathos and anguish, I fancy, are usually effects of distance,” he wrote. “At the place of action, where all are concerned together, healthy animal insensibility and heartiness take their place.”

Three hundred and some years earlier, Michel de Montaigne was nearly killed in a riding accident. He was knocked to the ground, delirious and vomiting blood. His companions were horrified at his apparent suffering, but Montaigne himself experienced the moment quite differently. Though he expected to die, he was in a state near ecstasy. “It seemed to me that my life was hanging only by the tip of my lips; I closed my eyes in order, it seemed to me, to help push it out, and took pleasure in growing languid and letting myself go.”

“I believe,” he says, “that this is the same state in which people find themselves whom we see fainting with weakness in the agony of death, and I maintain that we pity them without cause.” Our pity of the dying, Montaigne suggests, is an effect of distance similar to what James describes. To move from health to the worst extremities of disease and injury seems, from where we stand, a horrible traverse. But the conclusions we draw from our perception of the moment may not correspond at all to the inward experience of the sufferer. (It would be nice to believe this.)

There are, of course, various philosophical approaches to suffering. One is to suggest that suffering is the basic condition of existence and the lack of it only a brief anomaly. Another is to see in suffering something which may contribute towards a higher good, in this world or the next. Yet another is to deny that suffering is real at all. It’s tempting, but wrong, to read this last view into James and Montaigne. They don’t mean to suggest that suffering is illusion, only that we are wrong to imagine we always understand or recognize it.

Human beings have no monopoly on suffering and death. All living things die, and most, it seems, are capable of suffering to one degree or another. How many trillions of creatures were starved, maimed, crushed, tortured, devoured, or killed by disease before our ancestors ever came down from the trees? Some people find the idea of a life founded on these conditions intolerable and so they choose to believe in a primordial state without disease or violence, and a historic fall from that condition to our present one. They feel that suffering and death prove a sort of satanic disruption in the cosmos.

If there is a mystery to suffering, we’re not likely to solve it. Part of what James, at least, seems to have experienced, was the thrill of survival. I felt it myself in the first days after a car accident in which I was knocked unconscious and for an hour or two lost my memory. Even when we do not personally survive, however, survival is the universal rule. The world continues without us, and the life that we shared in for our portion of eternity is practically indestructible. I draw no conclusions, but this may provide a handle by which to turn the problem around in curious ways. In a passage from Walden Thoreau almost exonerates a murderous universe:

“I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp, – tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! With the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it. The impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence. Poison is not poisonous after all, nor are any wounds fatal.”

Marginalia, no.285

The only thing I can think of that distinguishes a man is a death sentence, Mathilde thought: it’s all there is that can’t be bought.

~ Stendhal, The Red and the Black

Death sentences aren’t sold only because we each get one free of charge at the moment of birth. There are ways to move up the date, but this is not recommended. As boys, my brother and I used to joke that dying was the only thing you ever really had to do in life; everything else was purely elective. Funny, I don’t remember us being morbid kids, and neither of us had read ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ yet.

Marginalia, no.279

Hrapp soon died…and difficult as he had been to deal with during his life, he was now very much worse after death, for his corpse would not rest in its grave; people say he murdered most of his servants after death, and caused grievous harm to most of his neighbours.

~ Laxdaela Saga

The histories of nations and families alike are thick with just this sort of zombie, deceased persons of such potent awfulness that their malice keeps spending itself even after death. The sign of a virtuous life and a spirit of philanthropy is to leave your survivors unhaunted and simply stay buried.

Marginalia, no.277

Happy are they whom privacy makes innocent, who deal so with men in this world, that they are not afraid to meet them in the next, who when they die, make no commotion among the dead.

~ Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall

A beatitude of anonymity. I am torn, day to day, between the comical lust for my name to live on the lips of future generations (for what accomplishments, I don’t know), and the more comfortable ambition of passing unremarked into death and fertilizing some convenient tree. I like most trees better than I like most people.

Marginalia, no.274

Life is the sum of the functions by which death is resisted.

~ Xavier Bichat, Physiological Researches on Life and Death

The most succinct explanations are sometimes the most inadequate. Bichat himself died at age thirty after falling down the stairs. I’m tempted to say that he was asking for it. But what is any man’s death except the sum of the functions by which he eventually succumbs to gravity?

Marginalia, no.234

She had carried me, dead, in her heart for three kilometers.

~ Jules Renard, Journals

To bear news of a death (prematurely in Renard’s case) will convince anyone that words have mass and weight. I once learned of an acquaintance’s suicide before his girlfriend, a close friend of mine, knew about it. I understood that to tell her myself would mean the end of our relationship as it had existed. I told myself it was a friend’s duty to see that she didn’t hear it from a stranger. Which seems right. But it’s also true that, as a nineteen-year-old ravenous for anything savoring of adult life, I was secretly thrilled at the prospect of being the awful messenger. I carried his corpse for two hours before finally delivering it to her.

Everyone Is Doing It

Twenty years ago I was somehow able to think about sex all day long. I could think about sex even when I wasn’t thinking about it. Temporarily distracted by bus schedules, term papers, potential muggers, or the likelihood of being able to pay my rent, sex still bubbled away undisturbed at the back of the old brain. Somewhere along the way, however, I traded my preoccupation with sex for a preoccupation with mortality. Death is the slow simmer now.

You might think that this would make me no fun to be around, but not so. I can be very charming when I happen to notice you or when I’ve downed a couple drinks. I don’t think my friends would consider me a morbid person. But then no one who knew me as an eighteen-year-old would have considered me a sex-obsessed monomaniac either.

Twenty years ago my experience of sex was, let’s say, comprehensively limited. I knew a bit about it, of course, the various scenarios in which it might occur, the basic biological processes involved. I knew people who had actually had sex. My experience of death today is similarly limited. I know a bit about it, the various scenarios in which it might occur and the basic biological processes involved. I know people who have actually died. But death for me (knock on wood) is still virgin territory.

Faced with the great catalog of life’s alumni, some people will panic at the thought of their own graduation day. Others find comfort in the thought of joining the beloved and admired who have gone before. Some may look to death as a final opportunity for rebellion or individualistic self-expression, but you might just as well see it as the ultimate surrender to peer pressure.

If death is a problem for you, religion may offer some limited assistance. “Limited” because you’ll always question your motives for faith if fear of death is what brings you to it. You may be so scared of dying that you’ll believe anything to make it seem less horrible. Anyway, religious solace only goes so far. If death is mere illusion, then life probably is too, and you’re back where you started. And even if there is a resurrection for dessert, you still have to eat your vegetables first.

Philosophy isn’t very helpful either. Spinoza wrote that the wisdom of a free man is a meditation on life rather than death, but he had to meditate on death a bit even to write that sentence. Socrates said that the whole business of philosophy was learning how to die. He said this because his sort of philosophy was all about cutting the threads that bind the divine and ethereal soul to the stinking, lice-ridden flesh – which is, conveniently, what death does too.

Montaigne wanted to endorse something like Socrates’ notion of philosophy in his earlier essays, but he couldn’t reconcile himself to making life into a death cult. Montaigne’s solution to the problem of death – if you want to call it a solution – was to not think of it as a problem in the first place. In his final essay, Of Experience, he recommends that we gratefully accept the world as God hands it to us, sex and death and all. It’s not as if we’re in a position to negotiate a better deal.

Death manages to feel like a problem anyway. I’m afraid of my children dying, or my wife. I’m less afraid, I think, of my own death, but I may be fooling myself. Twenty years ago I never would have admitted that I was afraid of sex, but of course I was terrified.

I can’t think about any of this without remembering Woody Allen’s 1975 send-up of Russian literature, Love and Death. In one scene, Boris (Allen) gets conscripted into the army that will face off against Napoleon, but before leaving he visits his cousin Sonja (Diane Keaton), whom he’s always loved. Full of foreboding on his own account, he asks Sonja if she’s scared of dying.

“Scared is the wrong word,” she answers, “I’m frightened of it.” An interesting distinction, Boris says.

Marginalia, no.226

Having been unable to do what they would, they have pretended to will what they could.

~ Montaigne, Essays II, 18

You may have noticed that, just before the deathblow, a gazelle will seem to sigh and resign itself to circumstances under the cheetah’s paw – almost as if it had finally found what it secretly wanted all along. Slow the footage for a moment and you’ll get a perfect icon of the peaceable kingdom. It may be one of those odd intersections of wisdom and foolishness in life, a sort of grotesque mercy: to finally choose what you can no longer escape.

Marginalia, no.214

The devil is a citizen of every country, but only in our own are we in constant peril of an introduction to him. That is democracy.

~ Ambrose Bierce, Disintroductions

According to Bierce, we can blame the Declaration of Independence when we fall into casual acquaintance with persons we’d prefer not to know. For example, I once shook hands with the Angel of Death in a hospital elevator in Boise, Idaho. I was fifteen at the time but I recall that he was well-mannered and looked something like you might expect: ancient and bony, with a firm, cold grip. He was often at the hospital, he said, visiting friends. Bierce suggests a practice of disintroductions to remedy unfortunate meetings like this. If it could be arranged, I suppose a disintroduction to Death or the devil might be worth something. So long as we could be sure to stay strangers.

Remembering Mary Irene

Mary Irene and I used to hunt snakes in the fields behind her house. By July the mustard flowers and tumbleweeds had dried up and blown away to uncover the little holes where I imagined that snakes plotted and hid. Playing the chivalrous protector, I would lead her by the hand through the field, poking a stick to right and left as we went. Once or twice I upset a harmless garter snake but never proved myself lethal.

Mary Irene Hart was my great-grandmother. For some reason I called her Nanny. She didn’t care for the nickname (she was no goat, she liked to say), but she put up with it. She was born in Colorado and had three sisters. Their father abandoned them early on to go north (to Canada? Alaska?) and chase after gold. Their mother raised them alone after that. They all worked and struggled but were happy enough. The girls liked to pretend that they were the March sisters from Little Women. Mary Irene was indisputably Jo. She was funny and curious, a bit of a ham and a tomboy. She got herself into trouble.

There are photos of her from the 1920s with a flapper haircut, wearing dresses and sweaters and hats by turns fashionable or frumpy. She’s laughing, pointing, squatting at a picnic, hiking in the Rockies, posing with an infant on her hip and a cigarette in her hand. She surprised everyone (or no one) by getting pregnant out of wedlock. She married my great-grandfather Small in a hurry and they moved to New Mexico where the baby was born – a boy. But she didn’t know how to care for him, and they were miserably poor. Her mother had to come from Colorado to rescue them.

The little boy grew up to rescue her too.  At some point, Mary Irene and her family moved to California, near San Francisco. Eventually her sisters and mother came. By now there were three children, my great-uncle Sonny, my great-aunt Marty, and my grandmother Barbara. Great-grandpa Small was a drunk and had favorites: he fawned after Barbara and blamed Marty for not being as pretty and compliant as her sister. He sometimes beat Mary Irene. One day he had knocked her down in an alcoholic rage when Sonny (by then a young man) charged at his father with a bat and told him to leave the house. He did and never came back.

After her children were grown and starting their own families, Mary Irene fell in love with a red-haired widower with the last name of Bennett. They had been good friends for years and it seemed meant to be. They married and were happy for a while, but after five or six years he ran off with another woman. She kept his last name the rest of her life.

My mother often took us to see Nanny when I was a boy. She lived alone in Antioch, below the grassy foothills of Mt Diablo, where the inland rivers are sifted through the delta on their way to San Francisco Bay and the Pacific. In front of her house was a lattice made of cinder blocks with the shapes of flowers carved out of them. Nanny herself was thin and wrinkled; she’d been a smoker all her life. When she opened the door a soft odor of cigarettes and perfume poured out. The living room was cool and an amber glow came through the curtains. Pictures hung on wood-paneled walls; there was a ticking clock, a television, a couch, framed portraits and ashtrays on side tables, and a china cabinet full of glass and porcelain figurines.

Nanny would take us out for shopping and lunch. She drove a ‘60s model Oldsmobile or Buick. I was crazy about that car – its white-walled tires, its flaring terminals over the tail-lights and its wide chrome grill. Bouncing on the vinyl backseat (without a belt, of course) I could sense the car’s mass and torque and felt like an astronaut floating free in the belly of a rocketship.

One year for Christmas or my birthday Nanny gave me a hardbound Companion Library edition of Mark Twain: Tom Sawyer on one side, Huckleberry Finn on the other. Of all the books I’ve lost track of down the years, I think I miss that one most.

There was a conversation that Nanny and I rehearsed almost every visit, another ritual like the snake hunt. It took place on the couch in the living room when the TV was turned off. Mary Irene would smoke elegantly and I would watch spellbound. “Nanny,” I would say, “where does the smoke go?” Then she would answer, “It follows beauty,” and trace the curling ghostly line through the air.  She’d end by pointing at me, pressing her finger to my lips.

My mother recently gave me some of Nanny’s china and the photograph above. It’s strange to see people we knew only in their later years frozen in the blush of youth. On the one hand, we’re disturbed: time’s toll is made plain. But then we’re consoled too: our memory of the person is somehow expanded, the portrait brightened a little. Looking at this picture I want to believe that there’s some corner of time where Mary Irene still stands outside by the garden with her funny pose and grin. In her eyes there is only – what? Laughter perhaps. There’s no mention of the burden of living, the trials of marriage and children, the expectation or memory of loss or pain; no rumor at all of the snakes that hide in the fields and aim for our ankles.

Those snakes got her eventually, despite all the protection my boy’s heart could offer. It happened when I was eleven. There was a stroke, paralysis, a hospital stay, another stroke, and she was gone. I had never lost someone close to me before. My mother called me in from play to tell  me the news. I shut myself in the bathroom with the lights off and cried. I fought hard not to understand it. How could she be so totally lost to us and yet so palpably near at that moment? It was as if she had turned a corner only a second before and I might still touch her arm if I reached round fast enough. Where had she gone? Maybe she had followed beauty too.