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(Hartshorne 1958: 387). When we are old and losing our zest death
is a good thing, thinks Hartshorne, because it spares us from an
otherwise inevitable descent into a state of tedium.
Walter Kaufmann goes so far as to claim that [f]or most of us
death does not come soon enough . Short lives, he suggests, have a
special intensity about them that long ones do not, and [l]ives are
spoiled and made rotten by the sense that death is distant and irrel-
evant . In a reminiscence of the Liebestod idea, Kaufmann maintains
that not only love but all life is enriched by the expectation of
death the more so where one has reason to anticipate an early
LONG LI VES, SHORT LI VES 49
rendezvous with death (1963: 373). A person lives better and
more vitally if he expects to live for only thirty or forty years rather
than survive into dreary decrepitude.
These views even the more moderate ones of Hartshorne are,
to say the least, open to question. Many people are at their most
zestful and enthusiastic in youth, but that is hardly a good reason for
supposing that it would be best for them to die while they are still
in their prime of life. In any case, even when the balance between
novelty and repetition is set firmly in favour of novelty, novelty
is not always pleasant, particularly when it has to be faced with
relative inexperience. Youth is not a period of unalloyed happiness
for most people, and many of the emotional, social and economic
problems of the young find their resolution only in middle age (the
trials of youth are, of course, the theme in countless popular nov-
els of the Bildungsroman genre). Every phase of a human lifespan
offers its own challenges and opportunities and even old age brings
new experiences, both pleasant and unpleasant (e.g. enjoying seeing
our grandchildren grow up, or learning to cope with failing health
and strength).
Corliss Lamont, taking issue with Hartshorne s assertion that old
people are generally bored people, reminds us that there are a great
many who are not. And even those who are need not be, since there
are always new books to read, new sights to see and new things to
do to ensure that life remains interesting. He also challenges the
claim that repetition is always tedious. Such activities as drinking
pure water, making love, listening to a great symphony or viewing
one s favourite natural vistas of forest or mountain, he suggests,
continue to be satisfying however often we do them. Because there
are many things we do that can be carried on in patterns of vari-
ety that seldom give rise to monotony , Lamont concludes that he
would rejoice in living on as an immortal upon our earth or in
some other place equally attractive (1965: 32 3).1
There is, though, a big difference indeed, an infinite one
between living a very long life and living for ever. Lamont might
enjoy skiing down his favourite snow-covered slope in Vermont at
the age of 100 (if he were still capable), or 200, but can he be sure
that he would still enjoy it if he were 10,000 or a million years
old, or if his years were past counting? Since no human being has
ever lived much beyond a century, we can only speculate on what it
50 DEATH
would feel like to live a really long life. Probably much would turn
on what one had done with one s life, and how creatively one had
developed and utilized one s opportunities. Someone of Lamont s
temperament might well make a greater success of serious longevity
than would the fifty-year-old man who once told me that he had
now done everything he wished to do and was ready to die. Yet, as
we shall see in the next section, there are some persuasive reasons
for thinking that, however much enthusiasm and resourcefulness
one brought to the business of living, one would find it very hard
to retain a sense of one s identity and continue to find life fulfilling
if one were immortal.
Lamont describes his own liking for the idea of immortality as
arising from a profound sense of the sweetness and splendor of
life . However, he also, without seeming to notice the tension,
ascribes his sentiments to the innate urge for self-preservation
(Lamont 1965: 33). This combination is problematic, since a basic
instinct to continue living and stave off death for as long as possible
has little to do with any positive, self-conscious valuation of life
and its possibilities. Members of quite lowly animal species have a
powerful instinct for self-preservation but we would not attribute
to them the thought that death is bad because life is beautiful. And
we are all familiar with instances of people whose lives have become
very painful and unhappy yet in whom the urge for self-preservation
is undiminished. So we cannot infer from the existence in us of a
strong instinct for self-preservation that life without end would be
good for us. That we are naturally disposed to flee death is not a
proof that death could never be a blessing.
In his book The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and in Peoples
([1912] 1931), the Spanish author Miguel de Unamuno voiced
one of the most powerful laments for the inevitability of death to
be found in modern literature. Conceding that arguments for the
immortality of the soul were, on the most favourable estimation,
inconclusive, Unamuno nonetheless found himself unable to accept
the horrifying idea that bodily death might be the end of us. That
I who am the centre of my universe, the centre of the universe
should expire is so unendurable a thought, according to Unamuno,
that the heart is entitled to overrule reason and reject it. While in
Unamuno s view the immortal yearning for immortality (1931:
38) lies deep within the soul of all human beings, it is hard to avoid
LONG LI VES, SHORT LI VES 51
the impression that he himself felt this longing with an intensity
that bordered on the hysterical:
I do not want to die no; I neither want to die nor do I want
to want to die; I want to live for ever and ever and ever. I want
this I to live this poor I that I am and that I feel myself
to be here and now, and therefore the problem of the duration
of my soul, of my own soul, tortures me. (1931: 45)2
Unamuno s passionate hatred of death is ostensibly provoked by
his sense of what we lose by dying (if death is the end of us): nothing
less than the whole universe. This attitude, he admits, is grounded
on egoism, which he sees as the principle of psychic gravity, the
necessary postulate of human existence (ibid.: 45 6). There is an
unmistakable echo of Wittgenstein in his talk of my losing at my
death a world that is at once my world and the world. Yet we might
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