A reader of this blog (oh, you read that right) recently asked me an unfair question. He requested a reading list on the good life. What can we read and consider that will make us more capable of facing down the next 50 or so years?
His question was unfair because, really, that is the only question I am interested in. In a certain sense, everything I read is an attempt to better understand how to live well. I’ve put together reading materials on Virtue Ethics, Family, and Embodiment, all in an effort to clarify that question and explore its potential answers.
But allow me to give a somewhat peculiar recommendation. I’ll bypass Plato, skip the Sermon on the Mount, ignore the Stoics, and head straight for Gizmodo. That’s right, I’m sending you to a tech blog to learn about the good life.
In 2015, Gizmodo posted a story called This Is What Happens to Your Body After You Die. The lengthy post chronicles the deterioration that befalls our flesh upon death. It tells of enzymes breaking down cell walls, of toxins running free, and of the body digesting itself.
Does that sound morbid? Gratuitous? If so, that’s not why I’m recommending it. I like it because it reminds me that I’m not built to last. I have an expiration date.
Such a conviction is hard to maintain. As C.S. Lewis once said, it can be difficult to believe that, “my hand, this hand now resting on the book, will one day be a skeleton’s hand.” Maybe that’s why the Bible returns again and again to remind us of our mortality. We are repeatedly being compared to flowers, and the comparison is not complementary. We aren’t flower-like in our beauty or fragrance, but in our ephemerality. “Like a flower he comes forth and withers.”
Being conscious of our mortality isn’t simply a piece of knowledge around which we can construct a theory of living. Rather, it is a way of being in the world. It makes us – or has the potential to make us – comport ourselves differently. This is something the philosopher of ethics seldom mentions, but that the novelist never forgets.
Consider Ames, the narrator in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead. In the book, Ames is writing letters to his young son. He does so because he is old and likely to die before his boy becomes a man. This knowledge, this settled conviction of mortality, pervades his thoughts and actions. He sees the world differently and more clearly than most of us. He is less ambitious, less vain, and more observant. I’d like to quote the entire book as an example, but I’ll settle for two paragraphs:
“As I was walking up to the church this morning, I passed that row of big oaks by the war memorial — if you remember them — and I thought of another morning, fall a year or two ago, when they were dropping their acorns thick as hail almost. There was all sorts of thrashing in the leaves and there were acorns hitting the pavement so hard they’d fly past my head. All this in the dark, of course. I remember a slice of moon, no more than that. It was a very clear night, or morning, very still, and then there was such energy in the things transpiring among those trees, like a storm, like travail. I stood there a little out of range, and I thought, it is all still new to me. I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees still can astonish me.
I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.”
Acknowledging the reality of death can shake us out of our stupor. It can kindle a sense of nostalgia and wonder for ordinary things. When death is our mentor, we are less likely to fall into boredom and pride. And we are more likely to be humbled and astonished by ordinary things; even a row of oak trees.