Rage Against the Dying of the Light

Are the dead here to live again? Is our already-overcrowded planet filled with the jostling souls of those who have lived and died over millennia, with each one somewhere on its own evolutionary path to Moksha or Nirvana? Do we actually possess a soul? Are we actually being judged at every second for our thoughts and words and actions?

The Hindu idea of the soul crossing a river after death approximates to the ancient Greek idea of the River Styx and the erasure of memory after the crossing.


Do Heaven and Hell really exist, with Purgatory as a kind of ante-chamber where you await your turn before being judged and then assigned to eternal Paradise or Hellfire?

Is there somewhere in space, a world approximating to the Gardens of Allah, with soft, soothing music and beautiful houris in attendance? It would be nice to think so.

But why does it really matter what happens after we die? Death itself is the central fact of our existence, the moment toward which we move irrevocably from the moment we are born. Learning about the fact of death transforms us at whatever age it happens. We try and protect children from “learning the facts of life” ---a euphemism for sex and its illicit joys. But can we protect them from the facts of death? They are all around us. Leaves wither and die, a butterfly flutters to its death after its too-brief time on earth, our most beloved pets get run over and their mangled bodies lie on the street for children to observe, our grandparents and parents age and grow weaker before our eyes and the violence implicit in our lives are endlessly played and replayed on television and cinema screens; even in cartoons, the Road Runner falls from a great height or Tom the cat gets mangled by machinery as he chases Jerry around the house. on shows.

“Die to every moment,” Krishnamurthi said. And at each moment, the past slips away from us; events blur and fade in our memory, the people we have known and loved, or who caused us pain and grief, are constantly being reinvented in our minds. Whole tracts of our lives are filtered through memory and fade with every passing day; at some point one cannot recall names that were once so familiar or faces that were our entire existence. Everything passes, everything ends.

And yet we are consumed by the need to prolong experience, consumed by the need to pile up possessions, to perform endless memorial ceremonies, recite endless mantras, year after year, for the peace of those migrating souls in the grey afterlife.

Making sense of our mortality is not easy. Religion may offer some of the answers, but certainly not the central one ---why? Science tells us how life happened----human consciousness, after those millions of years of evolution is still a miracle--- but it cannot satisfy our deepest needs to understand why evolution happened, why it was necessary.

Poets through the ages have raged against ‘the dying of the light;’ four thousand years ago, the Epic of Gilgamesh, says:

For when the Gods created man, They let
Death be his share, and life
Witheld in their own hands.

“Carpe diem,”says the first Ode of Horace, and in Ecclesiastes, “There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour.” And again in Gilgamesh:

fill your belly--
Day and night make merry,
Dance and make music day and night,
Look at the child that is holding your hand,
And let your wife delight in your embraces.
These things alone are the concern of man.

But there is also Andrew Marvell’s:

... .but at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

One can go on and on. Shakespeare offers one solution, “Nothing against Time’s scythe can make defence, Save breed to brave him when he takes thee hence....”

Our capacity to love may be our best defence against death. To continue to live in the minds and memories and genes of our children may be our only immortality.