On Time and Mortality

Old age creeps up on most of us when we least expect it. Of course we always knew it was coming, but who could have guessed it would come so soon? And did we really know it would come for us?

Homer’s Odysseus, bewailing the vulnerability of the human spirit, says that no one thinks he will suffer misfortune in the future as long as he is strong and his knees have their spring in them, but that when things change, the mind of man follows whatever fortunes Zeus brings upon him. Knees fail, as do all that they represent and seem to promise. Are we, then, at the mercy of fortunes that must turn downward in the end, and are Homer’s characters right in speaking of old age as invariably a grievous time?

These questions have taken on an immediacy for me in the past year as my own old age has arrived, as it does for many, with a diagnosis of cancer. Cancer is like old age on stilts. Energy rapidly declines; physical and even mental capacities wain; pain and discomforts of all kinds mushroom.

I recently perused Cicero’s De Senectute (“On Old Age”), a text I had deliberately saved for when I myself grew old, only to discover that it is written especially for the young. Framed as a dialogue between the Cato the Elder, a sage of the previous century, and two young friends, the book argues that old age need be nothing grievous, and indeed for the wise and virtuous it can even be a time of special fulfillment, but the foundations of an excellent old age must be laid early. Cato urges his young companions to live in such a way that at his age they will have impressive achievements to savor, keen minds and fit bodies to keep using, and respect, gratitude, and close friendships to enjoy.

Cicero’s Cato takes up in turn four common complaints against old age: that it withdraws us from active pursuits; that it deprives us of the greatest pleasures; that it weakens the body; and that it is not far removed from death. To the contrary, Cato argues, wise and respected elders can always be useful. The greatest pleasures, those of thinking, need not decline if one nourishes the mind with knowledge and strengthens it with daily exercise. Even the decline of sexual desires and prowess is nothing to regret, but rather a liberation from “a harsh and cruel master.”

Finally, and intriguingly, the figure of Cato claims that the approach of death at the end of a full life is itself nothing to be feared but rather a gentle, even sweet letting go, like that of a ripe pear dropping from its branch. The image is lovely, but how can the reality be pleasing? Welcoming our own demise seems as unnatural as making our knees bend backwards like a stork’s. And indeed, Cato’s mellow equanimity turns out to depend on his hopes for an afterlife. Death, of course, is nothing truly bad if something better follows, and faith for many does bring incomparable comfort. But what of those of us (including, I suspect, the skeptic Cicero himself) who do not expect an afterlife? Can we truly live happily in the lengthening shadows of life’s end, when the most robust constitutions so often give way?

Perhaps the worst thing about cancer is the simple closing in of horizons. It is so dreaded not only because of its high mortality rate, but also and especially out of fear of the long losing battle, the slow, inexorable, painful trek down to life’s final dark shore. Mine, ovarian cancer, is the cancer of cancers, not as catastrophic as pancreatic cancer but more insidious. It creeps up so silently that it is usually diagnosed only at a late stage. While remissions are common, recurrences are equally so, and they can come at any time, eventually killing most of us. Recently I received the welcome news that I am in remission, bringing me a step closer to an ordinary old age, yet with an extraordinary sense of life’s fragility and time’s finitude.

Modern philosophy and the project of modern science that it inspired have a great deal to say, but limited wisdom to offer, about this finitude. Thomas Hobbes taught that the strongest passion in the human soul is fear of violent death and that the first task of the state is to provide security against it — even as he said almost nothing about death itself. Francis Bacon argued that philosophy’s task is not barren speculation but “coming to the relief of man’s estate,” bringing prosperity, comfort, and longevity to ordinary men and women with new technologies and advances in economics and political science. The fruits of this project are all around us, quelling thoughts of death with the hum of endless new pleasures, opportunities, and distractions.

Nowhere has the Baconian project succeeded more impressively than in the advances of modern medicine. As I took my prescribed 10 daily walks around the halls of the MD Anderson hospital in Houston this February, recovering from a seven-and-a-half hour, three-surgeon operation that had amazingly managed to remove all visible tumors from my cancer-riddled body, I was humbled by the magnitude of human brilliance and resources and determination that go into giving us mostly elderly patients a chance at a few more years of life. But are we wise to rely quite so heavily on this search for weapons in the battle with an enemy, not cancer but mortality itself, that we are all destined to lose? On this question modern philosophy is virtually silent.

Ancient thought reflected more deeply on the necessities that circumscribe human life while seeking less to conquer them. Homer, whom Plato calls the educator of the Greeks and who likes to call humans simply “mortals,” offers in his Iliad an extended meditation on the way mortality shapes everything about us. It is mortality, he shows, that gives human life its weightiness and human souls their depth, in contrast to his light-hearted, carefree gods. It is the humans in Homer, not the immortals, who yearn to make a mark, who love most deeply, and even who think most deeply.

One of the impressive qualities of Homer’s heroes is their capacity to face calmly the death they loathe — despite their belief that after dying they will be mere flitting shades, without substance or clear minds. But Homer gives a fascinating glimpse of just how difficult it is to face human ephemerality squarely, even for those who try hardest to do so. In a famous passage in book 6 of the Iliad, the Trojan ally Glaucus encounters the Greek warrior Diomedes on the battlefield, challenging him to single combat. Not recognizing Glaucus, Diomedes asks who he is, and Glaucus is at first dismissive of the question. He says:

Yet in the next breath Glaucus can’t help but retreat to notions of glory and legacy, to the idea of one’s reputation persisting past death as a form of immortality. He tells the story of his illustrious grandfather Bellerophon, who killed the Chimera, and of his father’s parting injunctions to him to “be among the bravest” and keep up the bright fame of their family. Thus the leaf that stoutly acknowledges its destiny of falling into oblivion turns as it falls to grasp at permanence, and of course the Iliad itself is just such an effort — one of the most successful in human history — to keep alive the memory of fallen mortals.

Multiple schools of later Greek thought reflected on the problem of mortality and argued that facing it squarely is essential to living well. In Plato’s Phaedo, where Socrates comforts his young friends on the day of his execution with arguments for the immortality of the soul, he famously proclaims that to philosophize is to practice nothing else than learning to die. As Montaigne points out, the claim might mean, as it seems to in the context, that the philosopher practices despising the body and withdrawing from all earthly things, looking forward to becoming pure spirit in the afterlife. But it may also mean, as Socrates’ life as a whole suggests, that philosophy involves above all living this life wide awake, in full understanding of the necessities that shape life and full acceptance of the limits that constrain it.

Montaigne himself follows the ancient Epicurus in judging that philosophy’s greatest gift is in fact to teach us not to fear death and therefore to live happily here and now. Epicurus, who founded a wildly popular school of philosophy, unsparingly resists our squeamish desire to avoid thinking about death. He warns that “where death is concerned, we all dwell in an unwalled city,” and that “at our birth we each were poured a mortal brew to drink.” He does this not to make us gloomy but to flush out and purge a covert obsession with death that keeps us all anxious; plunges us into foolish, frenetic attempts to distract ourselves from what seems an unbearable truth; and lures us into futile efforts to build dykes that will not hold. In truth, Epicurus says, there is no reason to fear angry gods, for they do not exist; no reason to fear an afterlife of possibly terrible punishment, for death is the end; no reason to fear dying itself, for “death is nothing.” As long as you are living you have life, and death is not here. As soon as you die you are nothing, not some poor being deprived of everything good, but nothing at all. Just as you are not horrified at the thought of your non-existence a century ago, so you should feel no dismay at the thought that you will not exist a century hence.

And if death is nothing bad, the approach of it cannot be in itself bad either. “Foolish is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will cause pain when it arrives but because anticipation of it is painful,” Epicurus writes. “What is no trouble when it arrives is an idle worry in anticipation. Death, therefore — the most dreaded of evils — is nothing to us, since while we exist death is not present, and whenever death is present, we do not exist.”

Learn that life is now, Epicurus teaches, and embrace the pleasures that are available now and worth having, above all those of thinking and conversation and friendship. Being fully present and free of fear for the future, you will be best able to enjoy the present and will find that it is enough. As one of his maxims goes, “He who has least need of tomorrow will most gladly greet tomorrow” — an interesting thought.

The other popular school of ancient philosophy, Stoicism, likewise has much to say about time and mortality. While many Stoics did believe in an afterlife, they too have arguments about how to live well that stress being mindfully present with what is before us. External goods are not important, the Stoics claim; the things we are attached to should be held as lightly as possible, in full knowledge that all of them are ephemeral; what truly matters is being wise and acting virtuously. If we put our focus on doing the task before us as well as possible and let the outcome be what it may, we can be happy, so happy that misfortunes and even the death of loved ones need not crush our happiness. The austere Stoics’ teaching is far sterner than that of the light-hearted Epicureans, but they also press us to remember that no one has the future, only the present.

There is wisdom in all of this. Being mindfully present, choosing things worth doing, doing them as well as possible, and accepting the outcomes with equanimity is possible anywhere and anytime. Meditating on life’s brevity, we can best appreciate each moment; meditating on the fragility of all things, we can best appreciate each blessing. In these ways it makes sense that coming to terms with our mortality can help make life the best possible.

Yet still we may wonder: Are these Stoics and Epicureans, like Glaucus, deceiving themselves, even and precisely while trying so hard to face the truth? We humans are creatures of time, existing in and through it. The approach of life’s end reminds us that this is so and that time is not symmetrical, for we live planning, anticipating, reaching forward into the future. We are profoundly social beings, and even those who are reconciled to their own vulnerabilities and transience can be deeply shaken and grieved by those of their loved ones. We are beings embedded in the world, who care not only about our own pleasures or virtuous actions but about success in projects that affect others and that take time to accomplish. We are, finally, embodied beings. We are not just beings that have bodies, as we have cars and dogs, but rather, we are bodies that think and feel. When our bodies are well, we are well. The spring in our knees is precisely what most grounds our confident sense that all is well with us, as Thucydides so memorably shows in detailing the way the plague at Athens during the Peloponnesian War unstrung minds as much as or more than it did bodies.

Have I been deceiving myself, I wonder now, in my efforts to accept mortality — for example, when as an undergraduate I used to enjoy jogging in the old New Haven cemetery, somehow all at once bravely facing and defying mortality? Or when, later, I took pride in living life wide awake, pondering Homer’s and Socrates’ and Epicurus’s and the Stoics’ thoughts on death from the comfort of a still youthful, healthy body? There is an “everything is going to be all right” that can steal into precisely our best efforts to face mortality that is devilishly deceptive.

We are experts at making death abstract for ourselves, as Tolstoy illustrates in his story “The Death of Ivan Ilych.” Ivan has always known about death, having learned in his logic lessons at school that every man is mortal, that Caius is a man, and therefore that Caius is mortal. But somewhere in all that impeccable reasoning was a little escape clause. “This is all very well for Caius, but not for me,” the healthy Ivan always implicitly added. My death is certainly not coming now; it is in all likelihood so far in the future that for all intents and purposes it may as well be never.

Commenting on this story, the existential psychologist Irvin Yalom suggests that we all go through life with counterfeit vouchers in our pockets, promising us exemption from the universal human condition. Of course, we do not pull them out and look squarely at them, or we would be forced to see their absurdity. Self-deception is more clever than that. This year, when the pain at my core would tell me that all is not going to be all right, the ensuing gloom was startling. But now again, such a short time later, as remission takes hold and I feel again, for today, abundantly well, it is hard to remember that this even happened.

Does happiness require illusions? Psychologists who study depression note that depressed people are often better predictors of what is likely to go well and badly than mentally healthy ones are. Neuroscientists find that our brains expend as much energy suppressing troubling thoughts as remembering useful ones. Does mental health depend on going through life in rose-colored glasses? Does human thriving depend on refusing to accept the human condition, even when we most think we are doing so?

Perhaps there is necessarily a dynamic tension in the best life if the fullest flourishing means health and wakefulness, awareness of mortality and a recognition that, in all likelihood, one does have time to complete this project and the next one. It is some such complex balance that allows for the best use of time, the least sleepwalking through life, the fullest embracing and savoring of all life has to offer.

But if this is so, and if such a life is good, then surely wakeful, mindful, clear-eyed living is good in every stage of life. Even in decline it is still possible to be mindfully present with each moment, each experience, each person, choosing well things worth doing, doing them as well as possible, and embracing each day as the gift that it is. This is available even with a failing body, so long as pain does not overwhelm the possibility of finding pleasures worth having and things worth doing. Self-deception may come only in thinking that this is all we could wish for, or that doing it will ever be easy.

Odysseus, like Achilles, angry and raging and given to weeping, thinks himself at the mercy of fortune, but it is not at all clear that Homer agrees. Certainly Socrates, who gently chides this superb poet for his too-tragic teaching, does not. You don’t have to sit down and cry or rage when fortune pelts you with her arrows, Socrates insists. You can be an adult, and know that whatever your once supple knees are suffering now, your heart is strong enough to bear what life brings and to make something good of it. We can take as our model, then, not Homer’s raging heroes but Socrates, who showed a calm, cheerful strength right to the last hour of the last day, who took pride in having lived happily, and whose life was a blessing to his friends and students, both those he knew and those who would live centuries after him.

Lorraine Pangle is a professor of government and for many years was co-director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas at UT Austin.