I woke up from a dream an hour ago. I was staying with Philip Roth in his New York City apartment where I noticed that my beard had been shaved off. I said to myself in the dream, "You look good even without it." The vanity was cover for the fear that I am losing my power. I made coffee to wake up and to read the final pages of Everyman, Roth's 2006 meditation on mortality. At novel's end, Everyman's lamentations and self-excoriations give way to a certain buoyancy of spirit. Conferring with the bones of his parents at a Jewish cemetery bucked him up. That and a conversation with a black grave digger. Everyman was starting to feel indestructible again. We are, after all, born to live, not to die.
On the last page, the 71 year old Everyman, a sort of post-modern Adam, though never named, accepts a general anaesthetic for surgery on his right carotid artery. And here Everyman and the eponymous novel come to their end:
He went under feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager yet again to be fulfilled, but nonetheless, he never woke up. Cardiac arrest. He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.
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This morning, at a monkish hour, I penned the following on the fear of death.
What it reveals, perhaps, is that it is an illusion to suppose that one will be a detached spectator of one's demise. The spectator himself will cease to exist! The fear reveals the inevitability of a catastrophic loss. The fear, whose visitation is rare and typically nocturnal, is hard to recapture for analysis in the light of day because the transcendental spectator re-asserts himself. He would view death as an event in one's life, not as the end of one's life.
But it may be that such viewership is no illusion. It may be that the fear of death is not revelatory but a groundless fear and that the sense of spectatorship is revelatory. Fearing death, I fear a ghost: I am at my core immortal, either as an individual, or as the universal Atman. The questions arise: Who am I finally? Who dies? What is death? Can you tell me with confidence what consciousness is? You can't. There are many theories each undermined by the multiple others. No one can claim to know what consciousness is in its innermost nature. No doubt you know that you are conscious, and you know in the first-person way what it is like to be conscious; but you don’t know what consciousness is in reality. Might it then be presumptuous for you to suppose that you understand its absolute cessation? If you don’t know what it is, how do you know that it ends?
Roth’s post-modern Adam was “freed from being.” Roth was quite sure that when the body dies, the curtain falls; it does not rise. Is that something about which one is entitled to feel quite sure? Might it not be that at death one is freed from Seeming to enter Being? How does one know that to be is to be a material thing, or, in the case of an animal, that to be is to be alive?
Red today, dead tomorrow. But who or what dies?