tears. «Full of blind rage. An untouchable. No one who has
known me has loved me. Ever. No onecould love me.»
Suddenly, Pam rose and walked toward Philip. She
signaled Tony to change seats with her and, sitting down
next to Philip, took his hand in hers, and said in a soft
voice, «Icould have loved you, Philip. You were the most
beautiful, the most magnificent man I had ever seen. I
called and wrote you for weeks after you refused to see me
again. I could have loved you, but you polluted—”
«Shhh.» Julius reached over and touched Pam on the
shoulder to silence her. «No, Pam, don`t go there. Stay with
the first part, say it again.»
«I could have loved you.»
«And you were the...” prompted Julius.
«And you were the most beautiful man I had ever
seen.»
«Again,” whispered Julius.
Still holding Philip`s hand and seeing his tears flow
freely, Pam repeated, «I could have loved you, Philip. You
were the most beautiful man...”
At this Philip, with his hands to his face, rose and
bolted from the room.
Tony immediately headed to the door. «That`s my
cue.»
Julius, grunting as he too rose, stopped Tony. «No,
Tony, this one`s on me.» He strode out and saw Philip at
the end of the hall facing the wall, head resting on his
forearm, sobbing. He put his arm around Philip`s shoulder
and said, «It`s good to let it all out, but we must go back.»
Philip, sobbing more loudly and heaving as he tried
to catch his breath, shook his head vigorously.
«You must go back, my boy. This is what you came
for, this very moment, and you mustn`t squander it. You`ve
worked well today—exactly the way you have to work to
become a therapist. Only a couple of minutes left in the
meeting. Just come back with me and sit in the room with
the others. I`ll watch out for you.»
Philip reached around and briefly, just for a moment,
put his hand atop Julius`s hand, then raised himself erect
and walked alongside Julius back to the group. As Philip
sat down, Pam touched his arm to comfort him, and Gill,
sitting on the other side, clasped his shoulder.
«How areyou doing, Julius?» asked Bonnie. «You
look tired.»
«I`m feeling wonderful in my head, I`m so swept
away, so admiring of the work this group has done—I`m so
glad to have been a part of this. Physically, yes, I have to
admit I am ailing, and weary. But I have more than enough
juice left for our last meeting next week.»
«Julius,” said Bonnie, «okay to bring a ceremonial
cake for our last meeting?»
«Absolutely, bring any kind of carrot cake you
wish.»
But there was to be no formal farewell meeting. The
following day Julius was stricken by searing headaches.
Within a few hours he passed into a coma and died three
days later. At their usual Monday–afternoon time the group
gathered at the coffee shop and shared the ceremonial
carrot cake in silent grief.
41
Death Comes to Arthur Schopenhauer
_________________________
I can bear
the
thought
that in a
short time
worms will
eat away
my body
but the
idea of
philosophy
professors
nibbling
at my
philosophy
makes me
shudder.
_________________________
Schopenhauer faced death as he faced everything
throughout his life—with extreme lucidity. Never flinching
when staring directly at death, never succumbing to the
emollient of supernatural belief, he remained committed to
reason to the very end of his life. It is through reason, he
said, that we first discover our death: we observe the death
of others and, by analogy, realize that death must come to
us. And it is through reason that we reach the self–evident
conclusion that death is the cessation of consciousness and
the irreversible annihilation of the self.
There are two ways to confront death, he said: the
way of reason or the way of illusion and religion with its
hope of persistence of consciousness and cozy afterlife.
Hence, the fact and the fear of death is the progenitor of
deep thought and the mother of both philosophy and
religion.
Throughout his life Schopenhauer struggled with the
omnipresence of death. In his first book, written in his
twenties, he says: «The life of our bodies is only a
constantly prevented dying, an ever deferred death....
Every breath we draw wards off the death that constantly
impinges on us, in this way we struggle with it every
second.»
How did he depict death? Metaphors of death–confrontation abound in his work; we are sheep cavorting
in the pasture, and death is a butcher who capriciously
selects one of us and then another for slaughter. Or we are
like young children in a theater eager for the show to begin
and, fortunately, do not know what is going to happen to
us. Or we are sailors, energetically navigating our ships to
avoid rocks and whirlpools, all the while heading
unerringly to the great final catastrophic shipwreck.
His descriptions of the life cycle always portray an
inexorably despairing voyage.
What a difference there is between our beginning and
our end! The former in the frenzy of desire and the
ecstasy of sensual pleasure; the latter in the destruction
of all the organs and the musty odor of corpses. The
path from birth to death is always downhill as regards
well–being and the enjoyment of life; blissfully
dreaming childhood, lighthearted youth, toilsome
manhood, frail and often pitiable old age, the torture of
the last illness, and finally the agony of death. Does it
not look exactly like existence were a false step whose
consequences gradually become more and more
obvious?
Did he fear his own death? In his later years he
expressed a great calmness about dying. Whence his
tranquillity? If the fear of death is ubiquitous, if it haunts us
all our life, if death is so fearsome that vast numbers of
religions have emerged to contain it, how did the isolated
and secular Schopenhauer quell its terror for himself?
His methods were based on intellectual analysis of
the sources of death–anxiety. Do we dread death because it
is alien and unfamiliar? If so, he insists we are mistaken
because death is far more familiar than we generally think.
Not only have we a taste of death daily in our sleep or in
states of unconsciousness, but we have all passed through
an eternity of nonbeing before we existed.
Do we dread death because it is evil? (Consider the
gruesome iconography commonly depicting death.) Here
too he insists we are mistaken: «It is absurd to consider
nonexistence as an eviclass="underline" for every evil, like every good,
presupposes existence and consciousness.... to have lost
what cannot be missed is obviously no evil.» And he asks
us to keep in mind that life is suffering, that it is an evil in
itself. That being so, how can losing an evil be an evil?
Death, he says, should be considered a blessing, a release
from the inexorable anguish of biped existence. «We
should welcome it as a desirable and happy event instead
of, as is usually the case, with fear and trembling.» Life
should be reviled for interrupting our blissful nonexistence,
and, in this context, he makes his controversial claim: «If
we knocked on the graves and asked the dead if they would