15 Each pleasure we feel is a pleasure less; each day a stroke on a calendar. What we will not accept is that the joy in the day and the passing of the day are inseparable. What makes our existence worthwhile is precisely that its worth and its while – its quality and duration – are as impossible to unravel as time and space in the mathematics of relativity.
16 Pleasure is a product of death; not an escape from it.
17 If it were proved that there is an afterlife, life would be irretrievably spoilt. It would be pointless; and suicide, a virtue. The only possible paradise is one in which I cannot know I did once exist.
18 There are two tendencies in the twentieth century; one, a misguided one, is to domesticate death, to pretend that death is like life; the other is to look death in the face. The tamers of death believe in life after death; they indulge in elaborate after-death ceremonial. Their attitude to death is euphemistic; it is ‘passing on’ and ‘going to a better place’. The actual process of death and decomposition is censored. Such people are in the same mental condition as the ancient Egyptians.
19 ‘Passing on’: the visual false analogy. We know that passing objects, such as we see repeatedly every day, exist both before and after the passage that we see; and so we come, illogically and wrongly, to treat life as such a passage.
20 Death is in us and outside us; beside us in every room, in every street, in every field, in every car, in every plane. Death is what we are not every moment that we are, and every moment that we are is the moment when the dice comes to rest. We are always playing Russian roulette.
21 Being dead is nothingness, not-being. When we die we constitute ‘God’. Our relics, our monuments, the memories retained by those who survive us, these still exist; do not constitute ‘God’, still constitute the process. But these relics are the fossilized traces of our having been, not our being. All the great religions try to make out that death is nothing. There is another life to come. But why only for humans? Or why only for humans and animals? Why not for inanimate things? When did it begin for humans? Before Peking man, or after?
22 As one social current has tried to hide death, to euphemize it out of existence, so another has thrust death forward as a chief element in entertainment: in the murder story, the war story, the spy story, the western. But increasingly, as our century grows old, these fictive deaths become more fictitious, and fulfil the function of concealed euphemism. The real death of a pet kitten affects a child far more deeply than the ‘deaths’ of all the television gangsters, cowboys and Red Indians.
23 By death we think characteristically of the disappearance of individuals; it does not console us to know that matter is not disappearing, but is simply being metamorphosed. We mourn the individualizing form, not the generalized content. But everything we see is a metaphor of death. Every limit, every dimension, every end of every road, is a death. Even seeing is a death, for there is a point beyond which we cannot see, and our seeing dies; wherever our capacity ends, we die.
24 Time is the flesh and blood of death; death is not a skull, a skeleton, but a clock face, a sun hurtling through a sea of thin gas. A part of you has died since you began to read this sentence.
25 Death itself dies. Every moment you live, it dies. O Death where is thy sting, Death I will be thy death. The living prove this; not the dead.
26 In all the countries living above a bare subsistence level, the twentieth century has seen a sharp increase in awareness of the pleasures of life. This is not only because of the end of belief in an afterlife, but because death is more real today, more probable, now that the H-bomb is.
27 The more absolute death seems, the more authentic life becomes.
28 All I love and know may be burnt to ashes in one small hour: London, New York, Paris, Athens gone in less time than it takes to count ten. I was born in 1926; and because of what can happen now in ten seconds, that year lies not forty-one years but a measureless epoch and innocence away. Yet I do not regret that innocence. I love life more, not less.
29 Death contains me as my skin contains me. Without it, I am not what I am. Death is not a sinister door I walk towards; it is my walking towards.
30 Because I am a man death is my wife; and now she has stripped, she is beautiful, she wants me to strip, to be her mate. This is necessity, this is love, this is being-for-another, nothing else. I cannot escape this situation, nor do I want to. She wants me to make love, not like some man-eating spider, to consume me, but like a wife in love, so that we can celebrate our total sympathy, be fertile and bear children. It is her effect on me and my effect upon her that make all that is good in my time being. She is not a prostitute or a mistress I am ashamed of or want to forget or about whom I can sometimes pretend that she does not exist. Like my real wife she informs every important situation in my life, she is wholly of my life, not beyond, or against, or opposite to it. I accept her completely, in every sense of the word, and I love and respect her for what she is to me.
HAVING ONLY THIS
31 One consequence of our new awareness of death must be, and has been, an alarming growth of both national and individual selfishness, a Gadarene rush to enjoy the pleasures of the shops and senses before they close for ever. History will no doubt decide that such a rush was indeed the most striking event of the third quarter of our century; for it has not been the economic conditions that have fostered the current desire to spend and enjoy regardless of the historical situation, but ever more nakedly seen death that has created the tomorrow-we-die economic conditions.
32 Such terms as ‘affluent society’ and ‘conspicuous consumption’ are euphemisms, in the context of our poverty-stricken and starvation-ridden world, for selfishness.
33 I was taught to swim by an instructor of the old school. He gave us two lessons. In the first we were allowed lifejackets and he showed us the movements of the breast-stroke; in the second he took away the jackets and pushed us into the deep end of the pool. That is where man is now. His first instinct is to turn back to the rail and cling to it; but somehow he has to force himself out and swim.
34 Eventual non-being is our common ground. Once humanity realizes this any but the most nearly just world becomes insufficient. To try, as some religions and political creeds still do, to persuade people that what happens in this world is fundamentally unimportant, since its injustices will all be corrected in the next in the shape of an afterlife or some political Utopia – is to be on the devil’s side. And tacitly to support this belief by remaining agnostic is little better.
35 The driver of a truck carrying high explosives drives more carefully than the driver of one loaded with bricks; and the driver of a high-explosives truck who does not believe in a life after death drives more carefully than one who does.
36 Convince a man that he has only this life and he will do what most of us do about the houses we five in. They may not be the most desirable houses we can imagine, we may wish they were larger, more beautiful, newer, older – but we accept that this is the house we have to five in now, and we do our best to make it habitable. I am not a temporary tenant, a casual lodger in my present life. It is my house, and the only one I shall ever own. I have only this.
THE MYTH OF A SOUL
37 When I was a child my Cornish grandmother told me that the pure white husks of cuttlefish I sometimes found in the jetsam along the shore were the souls of drowned sailors; and some such concrete image as this of countless centuries of folk-belief has remained in all of us, even though intellectually we know what I discovered about the cuttle-bones: that eventually they go yellow and crumble into dust.