Considering death
If life is for the living, dying is for nobody
Of the big sadnesses – bereavement, ageing, disease – I fear death the least. I only hope to delay it as much as possible. Every day of life I complete, I move closer towards a sense of having had a good innings, and the phrase is one which contains a world of nuance; the batter who holes out after just making a start clearly has a very different experience to the one who gets out close or even exceeds 100, lifting the bat and taking the rolling applause from the crowd as they walk slowly from the field in the fading early autumn sunlight.
I regret to inform you that, in what will no doubt come as disappointment to long-term readers of the newsletter, I don’t know what happens after we die. ‘If anyone would know,’ I can imagine you scowling into your iPhone, ‘it’d be Harris. He writes that newsletter!’
I can say to you that I believe that the time before we were born provides an outstanding early clue; our experience of things before we came into the world, or specifically our absence of them. Personally, I experienced only centuries of peaceful non-existence before my birth – the entirety of Ancient Egypt came and went, the Roman Empire expanded and declined, the medieval era pursued its controversies to their exhaustion and obscurity and I can’t say that I felt I missed out on any of it. I just didn’t know. My own excerpt of the human story began in 1982, and it didn’t feel belated or premature; it just felt that for me personally, history had commenced.
So my suspicion is that when I reach the end of my particular trajectory that peaceful oblivion will resume. I say peaceful; it will just be oblivion, of no character whatsoever, not even cognizant of its own status. It will not contain the slightest memory of this sentence, or the previous one, or the next; it will just be nothing.
Does it scare me? I suppose it neither scares or uplifts me to think of that state. If I have any recurrent reaction to it it’s a suspicion that it makes suicide seem rather pointless, given how soon I’ll arrive at such radical unconsciousness. For all the agonies this life can bring, what difference does it make in the grand scheme of things to live another thirty or forty years with them? Of course you could say that it makes sense in that case to cut the dilly-dallying and get to the end state sooner.