Typically, the thought of death may be expected, first, to usher us towards whatever happens to matter most to us (be it drinking beside the banks of the Nile, writing a book or making a fortune), and second, to encourage us to pay less attention to the verdicts of others—who will not, after all, be doing the dying for us. The prospect of our own extinction may draw us towards that way of life on which our hearts place the greatest value.
This theme animates “To His Coy Mistress” (1681), Andrew Marvell’s famous poetic attempt to lure a hesitant young woman into bed, through lines that stress not only her beauty and his fidelity but also the less obviously romantic notion that both she and he will soon enough be stone dead. Addressing a subject who is apparently reluctant to express her desire due to anxiety over her reputation, Marvell uses the spectre of death to shift her attention away from her status within the community and towards her own wishes. He would not object to her coyness, he assures her, were it not for the fact that
… at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity… .
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Shakespeare, too, seemed eager to exploit death’s amorous possibilities. One of his sonnets urges his beloved to anticipate the moment when
forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field
even as another sonnet looks towards time’s transformation of
your day of youth to sullied night
While the thought of death may occasionally be abused (to alarm individuals or groups into doing things they might never do otherwise), more often, and more hopefully, it may help us to correct our tendency to live as if we could afford to defer forever, for the sake of propriety, our underlying commitments to ourselves. Contemplating our mortality may give us the courage to unhook our lives from the more gratuitous of society’s expectations. In the presence of a skeleton, the repressive aspects of others’ opinions have a habit of shedding their power to intimidate.
5.
Whatever other differences there may be between them, Christian and secular concepts overlap substantially on the subject of what is meaningful in life when viewed from the perspective of death. There is a strikingly similar positive emphasis on love, authentic social relations and charity, and a common condemnation of the pursuit of power, military strength, wealth and glory. These and certain other ends and activities seem almost universally inconsequential beside the thought of death.
Elsewhere in his Histories, Herodotus tells us an apposite anecdote about Xerxes, the mighty king of Persia, who in 480 B.C. invaded Greece with an army of nearly two million men. Seeing the whole Hellespont filled with the vessels of his fleet, and the plains covered with his regiments, Xerxes at first congratulated himself on his good fortune and abilities. But then, a few moments later, he began to weep. His stunned uncle Artabanus, standing beside him, asked what a man in his position could possibly have to cry about. The king replied that he had just realised that in a hundred years’ time, all these men arrayed before him, every one of the soldiers and sailors with whose help he had terrified the known world, would be dead.
We might feel no less sad, and no less sceptical about the value of fleeting achievements and impermanent notions of meaning, if we were to study a picture of the participants at a Heinz Company convention held in Chicago in the spring of 1902. The image of all these earnest men, each with his excited plan for increasing sales of ketchup and pickles in stores across the United States, should be enough to make us weep with the bitterness of King Xerxes of Persia.
Heinz salesmen, closing banquet, sales convention, Chicago, 1902
Of course, the inevitable erasure of our earthly efforts at the hands of death is foreshadowed in other tasks besides conquering nations and building brands. We may observe a mother teaching her dimple-cheeked child to tie his shoelaces, and find ourselves haunted by an image of both of their eventual funerals. Nevertheless, we may conclude that bringing up a child is a more effective way of cheating death than selling condiments, or that helping a friend enjoys an advantage over leading an army.
“Vanity of Vanity, all is vanity,” lamented the author of Ecclesiastes (1:2). “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever (1:4).” And yet it may be that, as Christian moralists would argue, not all things are equally vain. In some parts of Christendom, beginning in the sixteenth century, a new and very specific artistic genre emerged that would capture the imagination of the art-buying classes for the next two hundred years. Examples of “vanitas art,” so named in tribute to Ecclesiastes, were hung in domestic environments, most often studies and bedrooms. Each still-life featured a table or sideboard on which was arranged a contrasting muddle of objects. There might be flowers, coins, a guitar or a mandolin, chess pieces, a book of verse, a laurel wreath or a wine bottle: symbols of frivolity and temporal glory. And somewhere among these would be set the two great symbols of death and the brevity of life: a skull and an hourglass.
The purpose of such works was not to send their viewers into a depression over the vanity of all things; rather, it was to embolden them to find fault with particular aspects of their own experience, while at the same time attending more closely to the virtues of love, goodness, sincerity, humility and kindness.
above: Philippe de Champaigne, Vanitas, circa 1671 opposite: Simon Renard de Saint-André, Vanitas, circa 1662
6.
If reflecting on our own mortality is instructive, we may also find some relief from status anxiety in dwelling on the deaths of other people—particularly those whose accomplishments in life have made us feel the most inadequate and envious. However forgotten and ignored we are, however powerful and revered others may be, we can take comfort in the thought that the lot of us will ultimately end up as that most democratic of substances: dust.
Outside the village of Walsingham, in Norfolk, in 1658, a farmer tilling his field felt his plough strike something odd. It turned out to be one in a row of fifty urns in which a group of aristocrats had been ceremoniously buried in either Roman or Saxon times. The discovery created a minor sensation in East Anglia, which soon enough came to the attention of a doctor living in Norwich. By the end of the year, Sir Thomas Browne, taking the long-buried urns as his starting point, had produced a digressive meditation on the futility of striving for worldly greatness, on human imperfectibility and on the related need to recognise our dependence on God for salvation. He entitled his essay “Urne-Buriall; or, A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk.”
“In a field of old Walsingham, not many moneths past, were digged up between fourty and fifty Urnes,” reported Browne in his characteristic cadenced, lumpy English, “deposited in a dry and sandy soile, not a yard deep, nor farre from one another … some containing two pounds of bones, distinguishable in skulls, ribs, jawes, thigh-bones and teeth.” What interested Browne was how the identities of the dead, in their day the wealthiest and most important people in the area, had been entirely lost to history. Some had theorised that the remains were those of Romans, for the burial site was not far from an old Roman garrison; Browne, however, conjectured that they were more likely to be “our Brittish, Saxon or Danish Forefathers. ” In any case, no one would ever know their names, let alone in what century they had lived and died. From this, Browne moved on to reflect on the power of time to make a mockery of all human claims to earthly achievement and distinction: “Who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried?” he asked, challenging the dead aristocrats, who must once have felt confident of their place in the world, and hosted receptions and played the lyre and looked proudly at themselves in the mirror in the morning. “There is no antidote against the opium of time,” Browne admonished. “Generations passe while some trees stand, and old Families last not three Oaks.” Rather than try to achieve fame on earth, the duty of the honest Christian was to make an impression “not in the record of man” but instead “in the Register of God.”