Prose Before Hos

The Talmud says those who save one life save the world. Four hundred years ago, John Donne said the same thing, in reverse. "No man is an island, entire of itself ... any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind." We like to think that we embrace these teachings, with the similar teachings of Jesus Christ and Mohammed and the Buddha, with the compassion for human suffering that lies at the core of every great religion.

But most of the time, we don't. In the age of universal media, it's impossible. In the modern world, death is at once too ubiquitous and too distant. The morning paper brings us dozens of deaths, each of which ends a miraculous human life, each of which diminishes us all. And we feel nothing. There are simply too many of them.

But there are deeper reasons. Our society pushes death offstage. Even when those close to us die, they usually do so in a rationalized, bureaucratic hospital setting which shrink-wraps death. The inexplicable mystery becomes as ordinary as a corporate newsletter from beyond.

It isn't just our society as a whole that is responsible for this. We demand it. Death is the great unthought, the face we don't want to see. As the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote in "The Denial of Death," denying death is wired into humans. Our very personalities, our religion, our sense of the heroic -- all, Becker argued, are a response to our fundamental terror at our finitude.

-by Gary Kamiya, from the essay "A Tale of Two Horrors," published recently on Salon. Go read it. Now.

Comments

[Friend2]

TM, I can't help but feel you're quietly, evilly, pointing out that the historical and contemporary use of 'diminishes'... and pushing our tolerance for being diminished as islands toward the point of subsumption, whatever exactly that is. Oh, never mind. I think we already did this debate, and I'm seting myself up to lose, what with using 'subsumption' in the first paragraph. If it's a word at all.

Also, 'finitude'? Hmmm. If this were a student essay I'd write 'diction high WHY?'

Do like Gary Kamiya, however, and the essay as a whole is interesting...though 'corporate newsletter from beyond' seems a bit over-the-top. Guess there aren't many effective ways to speak of death and our attitudes toward the process.

[Friend2]

Goddamnit I spelled everything wrong. I feel...diminished.

[Kari]

Friend2 you're usurping my role as the miss speller. Please stope. ZThnks!

TM did you read last week's New Yorker? The first entry in the Talk of the Town section is written by Adam Gopnik and it's about the Virginia Tech incident.

[Kari]

Link
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2007/04/30/070430taco_talk_gopnik

While Gopnik is ostensibly discussing gun control and not death per se, it seems to me without parsing either piece of writing too closely that Kamiya's idea and Gopnik's argument are somewhat related.

One of the things I like best about this particular piece of writing is paragraph 2, where Gopnik points out the tendency of certain people (always people with some investment in the current status quo) to decry that is in "poor taste" to talk about something after the fact. Gopnik details how we go straight from Significant Event to "healing" with no treatment in between.

What that made me think of was the fact that the President went to Virginia to speak about healing almost immediately after the incident, when everyone was still in shock.

"Death is the great unthought," Kamiya says. Yes. These days it is. That is why the bodies come home from Iraq unseen and unacknowledged and why our President rushes to pat people on the back while the blood has barely finished welling in puddles on the floor. Best not to stop and try to see the truth, when we can brush past it quickly and be on our way.

[badfreak]

What's the only thing more useless than a poet?

A 17th century metaphysical poet.

[Friend2]

Donne and done.