The presiding spirit of this support can be found in Ian Hamilton Finlay's work at Little Sparta, his garden near Edinburgh (82, 83). Among the thin birch trees and simple flowers on the rough land of the Pentland Hills is set a tablet, like an ancient tomb stone, on the base of which has been carved the resonant Latin phrase et in arcadia ego. The words are the voice of the tomb: /, death, am here, in the midst of life. Arcadia was, for the classical world, the ideal countryside - the place where life is simple, straightforward and sweet. The tablet says: even in this place, where life seems good and right, you cannot escape from your mortality. We are being called to recollect our time-bound nature at the point when we are inclined to forget it. Versions of this image should hang in boardrooms,
the foyers of business schools, and should be displayed in the side-bars of internet dating sites. These are Arcadian sites of the modern world: the places where the appetite for success, for being busy and preoccupied, for being filled with hope and a sense of future possibilities are especially brought to the fore.
The point of such images is not to cast us down and leave us depressed and lacking drive or sense of purpose. On the contrary, the ambition is to sober our judgement about what is really important in the present by instilling a serious and realistic sense of our own mortality. From that point of view, the present does not become worthless - in fact its value is augmented. What happens is that the need to give our lives to genuinely worthwhile endeavours becomes more obvious to us, more clear and persuasive in the present.
In the ideal Gallery of Time, once visitors had contemplated the work of Hamilton Finlay they would be guided towards a painting by Jacques- Louis David (84). It shows an old man, the former general Bclisarius, who had worked under the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century AD and reconquered some of the lands of the former Roman Empire. After many successes, Belisarius lost his strengths and wit, fell foul of court politics and was, according to legend, reduced to begging for money in the street. The soldier on the left was once under his command and is now shocked to encounter his former leader in a condition of extreme want and abasement. The sufferings and humiliations of old age feel all the more significant because of the generals earlier triumphs. The painting argues that power and competence are no safeguard against nature. It happened to him, and he was once like you, or even a finer and more impressive version of the qualities you might see in yourself- and so it will happen to you in one form or another.
Imagine next a photograph of trees and leaves in autumn (85). Here we see something that, in a way, is immensely familiar. Leaves always do wither and fall. Autumn necessarily follows spring and summer. If we encounter this image, however, in a gallery devoted to time, ageing and death, with the previous works fresh in our minds, it gains a special purpose. It is asking us to frame our thoughts about mortality in the broad purview of nature. We are part of nature; its sequences apply to us as much as they do to plants.
A central feature of human experience is that while we know ourselves from the inside, and have an immediate, intuitive grasp of what it is like to be ourselves, we meet others only externally. We may feel close, we
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may get to know them well, but a gap remains. Hence, the sense of one's own individuality has a slight quality of separateness and difference from all others. What we see happening to others need not happen to oneself; this is a natural outcome of the way our minds are structured. Of course, it is not true, and we will not escape the common fate of all of our kind. We are always in need of cultural objects and practices that will press upon us the shared, inevitable features of existence. Our own life may feel special, but it cannot be essentially different.
The trees in autumn are an aid to reflection. They ask us to see ourselves as tied to the rhythms of the natural world. This may lessen, even if it cannot fully assuage, the sting of knowledge that we too will die. This is not a special horror; it is not a unique curse or punishment.
With these thoughts in mind, we turn to an image of profound and solemn calm (86). Hiroshi Sugimotos work is not explicitly about ageing or death, but by being placed in a sequence of images that have already impressed these fearsome, serious matters upon us it becomes powerfully relevant. This is the state of mind we want to cultivate in the face of what we have been exposed to. Our mortality does not call for panic, but for a sense of awe. We should be encouraged to let our eyes wander over the vast grey swell of the sea. We should immerse ourselves in an attitude of indifference. The waters of time will close over us; it will be as if we have never lived; the world will go on in our absence. In the huge scale of things, we are unimaginably small.
These thoughts could, of course, be crushing if they came to us at the wrong moment. But now they have a strange power to comfort and tranquillize. This image draws us away from ourselves; we forget our immediate hopes and preoccupations as we give ourselves over to contemplation of the hazy horizon and the even, pure tones of the watery sky.
Finally, we proceed to view the death of a distant galaxy, as seen from the Hubble telescope (87). Somewhere here, although the untrained eye does not know where to locate it, a star is in the final throes of a cataclysmic explosion. All the unimaginably vast residue of its matter, which was pulled together so infinitesimally slowly and which burnt for aeons in a blinding furnace of power, is finally flung back into the universe. Science here joins art to dignify and lend tragic grandeur to our appalling fragility.
The result of a closer attention to our mortal selves would be being more attuned to what was coming, and therefore grateful and more appreciative of what we have; we would be nicer. The sequence of experiences and thoughts laid out in this imaginary gallery are not novel or particularly complicated. That is how it should be: our problem is not that we cannot understand them or need special occasions to teach us recondite ideas. The problem is that we forget what is obvious. These are ideas that call for daily renewal in our inner lives; we must always return to them. By enfolding them in memorable images, they live more intently in our minds; they spring forward into consciousness more readily; they are always to hand.
Contemplating our own mortality in the falling leaves.
85. Ansel Adams. As/tens, Dawn. Autumn, Dolores River Canyon, Colorado. 1937
Art invites us to a culture that anticipates suffering and decay, which our own culture denies. The galleries of the future will take it seriously, and make an adequate, public and consoling home for our fleeting, middle-of-the-night apprehensions.
The ultimate perspective on life.
87. NASA. ESA and (he Hubble Heritage Team. Globular Cluster NGC 1846, 2006
A particular type of unhappiness results when we devalue our circumstances because they are not those we recognize from art. Art lends prestige, and when it is not around, when it has not yet caught up with our reality, we can feel an aching, envious sense that the realm of beauty and interest is utterly removed from our own situation.