We are born into the
certitude of our eventual death. Every once in a while, something — perhaps an encounter with a robin’s egg,
perhaps a poem —
staggers us with the awful, awe-filled wonder of aliveness, the sheer luck of
it against the overwhelming cosmic odds of nonexistence. But alloyed with the
awe is always the half-conscious grief that one day the light of consciousness
will be extinguished.
It is a heavy gift
to hold, this doomed delirium of aliveness. It is also a buoyant gladness, if
we are limber enough to stretch into the cosmic perspective that does not come
naturally to us small, Earth-bound bipeds cotticed with tender self-importance.
Consider this.
For each of us, one thing is true: Had any one variable been
ever so subtly different — had your parents mated on a different day or at a
different altitude, had the early universe cooled a fraction of a second faster
after the Big Bang, you would not exist as the particular constellation of
atoms configuring the particular consciousness that makes you, you.
Because chance plays such dice with the universe,
and because the die dictates that the vast majority of energy and matter never
had the luck of cohering into this doomed delirium of aliveness, it is, in some
profound and practical sense, a staggering privilege to die — one that betokens
the privilege of having lived.
To lament death, then, is to lament our luck, for
any negation of the possibility of death is a negation of the improbable
miracle of life, a wish for there to be nothing to do the dying — nothing to
have partaken of the beautiful, bittersweet temporality of aliveness.
A civilization after Marcus Aurelius celebrated mortality as the key
to living fully, half a millennium after Montaigne observed that “to lament that we shall not be
alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive
a hundred years ago,” and a scientific epoch after Darwin contemplated the meaning of
mortality in the wake of his beloved daughter’s death, Dawkins
writes:
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most
people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The
potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact
never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly, those
unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton.
“We know this because the set of possible people
allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth
of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we
whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority
have never stirred?”
From Marginalian by Maria Popova
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