Words&Dirt

“Existential despair––the sudden awareness of the truth of one’s existence––is an important ingredient in almost every description of spiritual awakening from ancient to modern times.  In a more modest form, moments of sudden awareness of one’s situation (or some aspect of it) occur in the lives of many ordinary people––including Tom Rath, the main character in Sloan Wilson’s classic novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit:

I was my own disappointment….I really don’t know what I was looking for when I got back from the war, but it seemed as though all I could see was a lot of bright young men in gray flannel suits rushing around New York in a frantic parade to nowhere.  They seemed to me to be pursuing neither ideals nor happiness––they were pursuing a routine.  For a long while I thought I was on the sidelines watching the parade, and it was quite a shock to glance down and see that I too was wearing a gray flannel suit.

When the stark realization of our mortality is added to the equation, the experience can be much deeper and more terrifying than the ‘loss of meaning’ that many of us undergo at some time in our lives.  The recognition of the ‘must-die’ outcome to our lives is something that no other animal can foresee.  Although we all acknowledge that we are mortal (or at least our body is), for some of us this realization affects every part of our being in a most profound way.  James Fowler vividly described his own experience:

Four A.M. in the darkness of a cold winter morning, suddenly I am fully and frighteningly awake.  I see it clearly: I am going to die.  I am going to die.  This body, this mind, this lived and living myth, this husband, father, teacher, son, friend, will cease to be.  The tide of life that peoples me with such force will cease and I––this I taken so much for granted by me––will no longer walk this earth.  A strange feeling of remoteness creeps over me.  My wife, beside me in bed, seems completely out of reach.  My daughters, asleep in other parts of the house, seem in this moment like vague memories of people I had once known.  My work, my professional associates, my ambitions, my dreams and absorbing projects feel like fiction.  ‘Real life’ suddenly feels like a transient dream.  In the strange aloneness of this moment, defined by the certainly of death, I awake to the true facts of life.  In that moment of unprecedented aloneness experienced in my thirty-third year, I found myself staring into the abyss of mystery that surrounds our lives.

The French scientist, mathematician, and philosopher Blaise Pascal, (1623-1662) expressed the prevailing sentiment of existential anxiety in his book Pensees, which deeply moved me as I took a lone walk and looked into the dark star-dotted sky in a summer night:

When I consider the brief span of my life, absorbed into the eternity before and after, the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then.  Who put me here?  By whose command and act were this time and place allotted to me?…The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrified me.”

––Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential: A Cosmic Vision for Our Future Evolution, by Ted Chu, pg. 197-8

“I have tried to live right in the sight of God and man, for the honor and comfort of my Christian husband and the love and respect of my Christian children.  So that when I lay me down in the consciousness of my duty and reward I will be surrounded by loving faces, carrying the farewell kiss of each of my loved ones into my reward.  Not like Addie Bundren dying alone, hiding her pride and her broken heart.  Glad to go.  Lying there with her head propped up so she could watch Cash building her coffin, having to watch him so he would not skimp on it, like as not, with those men not worrying about anything except if there was time to earn another three dollars before the rain come and the river got too high to get across it.  Like as not, if they hadn’t decided to make the last load, they would have loaded her into the wagon on a quilt and crossed the river first and then stopped and give her time to die what Christian death they would let her.

Except Darl.  It was the sweetest thing I ever saw.  Sometimes I lose faith in human nature for a time; I am assailed by doubt.  But always the Lord restores my faith and reveals to me His bounteous love for His creatures.  Not Jewel, the one she had always cherished, not him.  He was after that three extra dollars.  It was Darl, the one that folks say is queer, lazy, pottering about the place no better than Anse, with Cash a good carpenter and always more building than he can get around to, and Jewel always doing something that made him some money or got him talked about, and that near-naked girl always standing over Addie with a fan so that every time a body tried to talk to her and cheer her up, would answer for her right quick, like she was trying to keep anybody from coming near her at all.

It was Darl.  He come to the door and stood there, looking at his dying mother.  He just looked at her, and I felt the bounteous love of the Lord again and His mercy.  I saw that with Jewel she had just been pretending, but that it was between her and Darl that the understanding and the true love was.  He just looked at her, not even coming in where she could see him and get upset, knowing that Anse was driving him away and he would never see her again.  He said nothing, just looking at her.

‘What you want, Darl?’ Dewey Dell said, not stopping the fan, speaking up quick, keeping even him from her.  He didn’t answer.  He just stood and looked at his dying mother, his heart too full for words.”

––As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner, pg. 23-5