The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy

 

After the rosary we always prayed for the grace of a happy death.  If you want to pray for anything that the very act of praying for it might make happen that is a candidate. The Ivan Ilyich household must have neglected this petition for what the novella depicts is a deeply unhappy, protracted, painful and unresigned death.  Why be resigned, why not cry out ‘de profundis clamavi’, why me?  The bad news is that there never will be a rescue.  You are manacled to the tracks and the train has set out.   Ivan when he reviews his glory days as a lawyer, the obiter dicta of a fine forensic mind grinding out judgements, the respect of his peers, the difficult decisions about curtains and sofas, these important events in the life of a man who has attained to a respected position in society are nugatory, trivial and not a fit preparation for the final examination.  Eschatology is one of those subjects that one must mug up daily.  

Tolstoy first did the death then he did the dying which inverts the normal procedure allowing him to demonstrate how the passing of a personage can cause difficulty for a bridge evening.  As soon as the wife has sounded a colleague about whether there might be additions to pension entitlements the mourner can slip away after the service in the room where Ivan is laid out.   

The dying as related by Tolstoy and God ought to induce recollection in the religious or, in that charmingly deflecting locution, mortality salience, in the secular humanist.  Terrifying or bracing, death is there and is waiting.

'Rising Up and Rising Down' by William T. Vollmann

 

William T. Vollmann was totally unknown to me but a review of his multi volume book ‘Rising Up and Rising Down’ seemed to promise an interesting read in that no man’s land between the IGR (intelligent general reader) and the savant.  A touch of hands on ontology, a report from harm’s way, written by a man who knows the smell of death. Vinegar and vomit but not as experienced outside the chip shop as a drunk’s technicolor yawn.

Hemingway had a go in ‘For who the Bell tolls’.

“All right, Inglés. Learn. That’s the thing. Learn. All right. After that of the ship you must go down the hill in Madrid to the Puente de Toledo early in the morning to the matadero and stand there on the wet paving when there is a fog from the Manzanares and wait for the old women who go before daylight to drink the blood of the beasts that are slaughtered. When such an old woman comes out of the matadero, holding her shawl around her, with her face gray and her eyes hollow, and the whiskers of age on her chin, and on her cheeks, set in the waxen white of her face as the sprouts grow from the seed of the bean, not bristles, but pale sprouts in the death of her face; put your arms tight around her, Inglés, and hold her to you and kiss her on the mouth and you will know the second part that odor is made of.”

I’m only beginning to read the first volume so I won’t be able to give a full account of it but the augeries are good.  Death is his subject and the anatomy of the grave. There is good Doctor Browneian stuff, the catacombs of Paris, the skulls of Cambodia, blunt force trauma in San Francisco, the corpses delivered for autopsy in an upright position strapped to tall sack trolleys to avoid the hills. Then he smells the coffee in Vienna. There’s a cure in that. He says - I take my meaning where I can find it, when I can’t find it, I invent it.’

He is not as keen to make your flesh creep as the Fat Boy in Dickens who offered to recite ‘The Blood Drinkers Burial’ (in character).  Hello darkness my old friend, but there must be a sense of injustice at being compelled to feel guilty over the death of his sister by drowning  when he was in charge of her, he being 9 and she 6.  Care sears guilt into our bones.

He would concur with that other eschatological doctor Saint Francis de Sales in his Fifth Meditation (Introduction to the Devout Life):

“Consider the universal farewell which your soul will take of this world.  It will say farewell to riches, pleasures, and idle companions, to amusements and pastimes, to friends and neighbors, to husband, wife, and child, in short to all creation.  And lastly it will say farewell to its own body, which it will leave pale and cold, to become repulsive in decay.”

The writing is good, clear, sober prose with a moderate cadence, no flights.  There is no sense of running to meet your inevitable fate, that full stop.

Common Sense on Covid

 Common sense consensus on covid  is that complete elimination is a mirage and moreover it will be a new recruit to the hazards of life to which some will succumb.  It is odd that now at this time the utility of mandates should be urged.  Even philosophers are climbing out of their burrows and shaking their tiny fists at anti-vaxxers and the hesitant.  These are people that are famous for the devising of complex thought experiments which tease out all the facets of moral problems who yet have failed to see what is patent.  Bari Weiss on her ‘common sense’ substack has a range of views on the mandate.  The medical people are dubious about it particularly Vinay Prasad whose cogent analysis breaks the population down into  various groups.  (Vinay Prasad is a hematologist-oncologist and an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. )

Bari Weiss common sense

For the philosophers in the academy who want to eke some moral maundering out of covidology: some texts.

Lament for the Makers by William Dunbar

The stait of man dois change and vary,

Now sound, now seik, now blith, now sary,

Now dansand mery, now like to dee;

Timor mortis conturbat me.  (extract)

Lament

Aes Triplex by Robert Louis Stevenson:

THE changes wrought by death are in themselves so sharp and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their consequences, that the thing stands alone in man's experience, and has no parallel upon earth. It outdoes all other accidents because it is the last of them. Sometimes it leaps suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug; sometimes it lays a regular siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score of years. And when the business is done, there is sore havoc made in other people's lives, and a pin knocked out by which many subsidiary friendships hung together. There are empty chairs, solitary walks, and single beds at night. Again, in taking away our friends, death does not take them away utterly, but leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon intolerable residue, which must be hurriedly concealed.  (opening lines)  (find at: Aes Triplex

‘To Philosophise is to learn how to Die’. by Michel de Montaigne. (no. 20)

His last and very apposite paragraph:

Children are frightened of their very friends when they see them masked.  So are we.  We must rip the masks of things as well as off people.  Once we have done that we shall see underneath only that same death which a valet and a chambermaid got through recently, without being afraid.  Blessed the death which leaves no time for preparing such gatherings of mourners.

Sting

There is always going to be talk about conspicuous examples of events that we can only characterise as evil. The account of how they happened on a naturalistic causal basis often then turns to the question why a good God allowed them to happen. This concept of God which is taken to be the dominant one in the West is thereby found wanting. Such a God is absurd, ergo there is no God or if he’s not dead he’s as good as dead.

The Gnostics considered that all matter is aimed at death and has at its ontological core a lack. Augustine in a different sense took lack as the source of evil. Whereas the Gnostics took matter as such to be evil, in Christian theology matter itself is transcended. My father related to me once that when they repaired to the pub which was also the undertakers after a funeral on the counter he saw the receipt for the coffin: to one ‘victory’ £6/6/0‘. “O death where is thy sting,o grave where is thy victory, ”.

However the soul’s connection to the body as the form of the body is maintained in the post mortem state. The body then will be a ‘soma pneumatikos’ , a spiritual body. If you’re going to have a personal immortality then the body in some manner must come into it. Matter itself is transformed in the Christian account and in this final reckoning the lack in matter that is fundamental to the occurrence of evil is rectified.