Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;

Never to have drawn the breath of life,never to have looked into the eye of

day;The second best’s a gay good night and

quickly turn away.—W. B. YeatsAs a college student long ago in

the 1950s I nurtured the thought ofone day becoming a writer, and onthe advice of an instructor in sopho-more English Lit., I attempted toform the habit of keeping a journal.I didn’t know what it was that Ihoped to write—poetry in imitationof Ezra Pound, novels along the linesof Balzac or F. Scott Fitzgerald,maybe stories like those of J. D.Salinger—and so I was glad to betold that it didn’t matter what wentdown on the page. Anything at all,the man said. Describe somethingyou saw yesterday in the street, copyout five paragraphs by Jane Austen,reconstruct a conversation over-heard in a men’s room or on a train,make a list of exotic birds, count thenumber of windows in Woolsey Hall,compose a letter to Rita Hayworth;learn to put one word after another,like your feet in your shoes, andmaybe you’ll find out that you havesomething to say.

That the odds didn’t favor thespeculation I could infer from the

tone of the instructor’s voice, but offand on over the past fifty years I’vekept up the practice of salvagingstray thoughts and random observa-tions from the remains of a week or aday. Sometimes I’ve let three or fouryears lapse between entries; at othertimes, fortified by a surplus of dutifulresolve, I’ve made daily notations forperiods as long as nine or twelvemonths. The focus has shifted withthe books that I happen to be read-ing, with the trend of the headlines,and with the changes in venue ac-companying the transfer from a sin-gle to a married state, but I noticethat I retain an interest in the lastwords spoken by people biddingfarewell to their lives and times fromthe height of a scaffold or the deckof a sinking ship, outward bound onthe voyage to who knows where.The dying of the light was a topic towhich I was introduced in grammarschool by a Latin teacher fond ofquoting Montaigne as well as Ciceroand Sophocles, and somewhere insight of an eighth-grade blackboard Iwas given to understand that tolearn how to die was to unlearn howto be a slave, that no man was to becounted happy until he was dead.The words made a greater impressionthan probably was intended or ex-pected because I was raised in a fam-ily unincorporated into the body ofChrist, and at the age of thirteen, itnever once having occurred to me toconsider the prospect of an afterlife,I knew that I lacked the documentsrequired to clear customs in Heaven.

Eternal life might have been grantedto the Christian martyrs delivered tothe lions in the Roman Colosseum,presumably also to Sir ThomasMore, saying to the man with theaxe while mounting the stair to hisexecution, “See me safe up, and formy coming down let me shift for my-self.” But without an insurance poli-cy guaranteed by a church, how didone make a last stand worthy ofWilliam Bendix confronted with4,000 Japs swarming ashore on WakeIsland, or hit upon an exit line up tothe standard of Oscar Wilde’s “Ei-ther that wallpaper goes, or I do”?

The question came up during theyear in college when I contracted arare and particularly virulent form ofmeningitis. The doctors in the emer-gency room rated my chance of sur-vival at nil or next to none, one ofthem telephoning my father in NewYork to say that his son would be gonewithin the hour and he could savehimself the trouble of trying to get toNew Haven before morning. It was ateaching hospital, and to the surpriseof all present I responded to the infu-sion of several new drugs never be-fore tested in combination, and fortwo days, drifting in and out of con-sciousness in a ward reserved for pa-tients without hope of recovery, I hadample chance to think a great thoughtor turn a noble phrase. Nothing cameto mind; there were no windows tocount, no exotic bird at the foot ofthe bed. Nor do I remember beinghorrified. Astonished, not horrified.Here was death making routine hos-

NOTEBOOKOn Deadline

By Lewis H. Lapham

NOTEBOOK 7

Lewis H. Lapham is the National Corre-spondent for Harper’s Magazine and the edi-tor of Lapham’s Quarterly.

pital rounds—the man in the nextbed died in the first night, the womanto his left on the second—and it wasas if I was in a foreign country waitingto be approached by the skeletal figurewith the scythe whom I’d seen in thefourteenth-century woodcuts illus-trating the lectures in the history ofMedieval art. Apparently an old sto-ry, but one that, before being admit-ted to the hospital as a corpse in all butname, I hadn’t guessed was also myown, my own and that of every otherliving thing on earth at that momenton the road to the same tourist desti-nation—once-in-lifetime, not-to-be-missed—that didn’t sell postcards and

from whose sidewalk cafés no traveler returned.Three months later I left the hos-

pital knowing that my reprieve wastemporary, subject to cancellation onshort notice, and in the years since,I’ve tried to live every day in the pre-sent tense, piecing together the con-solations of philosophy from writerschoosing to look death in the face andto draw from the encounter the breathof life. The reluctance to do so I taketo be a root cause of most of our twen-ty-first-century American sorrows (so-cioeconomic and aesthetic as well ascultural and political), and as a rem-edy for our chronic states of fear andtrembling I know of none better thanSimon Critchley’s The Book of DeadPhilosophers, published last Februaryby Vintage. The global economy atthe time was sliding into the wine-dark sea of unfathomable debt, andhere was Critchley on the boat deck ofthe Titanic cheerfully reminding thetop-hatted Wall Street gentlemen thatDiderot had choked to death on anapricot, that Heracleitus had suffo-cated in cow dung, and that Mon-tesquieu died in the arms of his lover,leaving unfinished an essay on taste. Aprofessor of philosophy at the NewSchool for Social Research in NewYork, Critchley declares his purposeon the first page of the introduction.Absent a philosophical coming toterms with death, we are, he says,

Led, on the one hand, to deny the factof death and to run headlong into thewatery pleasures of forgetfulness, intox-ication and the mindless accumulationof money and possessions. On the oth-

er hand, the terror of annihilation leadsus blindly into a belief in the magicalforms of salvation and promises of im-mortality offered by certain varieties oftraditional religion and many New Age(and some rather old age) sophistries.

The observation speaks not onlyto the heavy cost of our health-caresystems and our childish war on ter-ror but also to the current losses inthe credit markets and to the inces-sant hawking of fairy tales that is thebone and marrow of most of ourprime-time news and entertainmentmedia. Had Critchley been of a mindto do so, I don’t doubt that he couldhave assembled a five-volume treatiseon any and all of the unhappy con-sequences, complete with many pagesof statistical proof backed up withoracular mutterings from authoritiesboth secular and divine. He choosesto do something more lightheartedand therefore more useful—to takenote of the deaths of “190 or so”philosophers with the thought that byattending to the manner of their shuf-flings off the mortal coil his readermight profit by their example. Heborrows the device from Montaigne’sessay On the Uses of Philosophy: “IfI were a maker of books, I wouldmake a register, with comments, ofvarious deaths. He who would teachmen to die would teach them to live.”

The dramatis personae in Critch-ley’s register of last scenes, some ofthem described in two or three para-graphs, others at the length of two orthree pages, rounds up the usual sus-pects, among them a few women(Hipparchia, Madame du Châtelet,Hannah Arendt), several Christiansaints (St. Paul, St. Anthony,Boethius), and a small number ofArabs and Chinese (Avicenna, Aver-roës, Confucius, Lao Tzu), but largelythe company of dead white males(ancient Greek and modern German)embodying the tradition of Westernphilosophy as it has come down to usover the past 2,000 years from Thalesof Miletus to Derrida and Rawls.

Some of the anecdotes were famil-iar, noted in my own lists of final de-partures—Socrates at the conclusionof the trial that condemned him todeath, saying to his judges, “Now it istime that we were going, I to die andyou to live; but which of us has the

happier prospect is unknown to any-one but God”; Seneca commanded bythe Emperor Nero to commit suicide,engaging his friends in easy conversa-tion while the blood drained from hiswrists and arms; Voltaire, irritated bya parish priest asking him if he be-lieved in the divinity of Christ, saying,“In the name of God, Monsieur, don’tspeak to me any more of that man andlet me die in peace.” Most of the sto-ries were ones I hadn’t known—DavidHume shortly before he died in 1776graciously entertaining James Boswell’sassurance of a soon-to-be-revealed af-terlife on the ground that “it was pos-sible that a piece of coal on the firewould not burn”; Jean Baudrillard,writing his last book, Cool MemoriesV, after having been diagnosed withthe cancer that killed him, “Death or-ders matters well, since the very factof your absence makes the world dis-tinctly less worthy of being lived in.”

For Critchley’s purpose it doesn’tmatter whether the “190 or so deaths”have been recorded elsewhere orwhether some of his sources are prob-ably apocryphal or possibly misin-formed. The sum is greater than theparts because the truth to be told, byCicero baring his neck to Antony’scenturion on the road to Naples asby Heinrich Heine dying of syphilis innineteenth-century Paris, can be ver-ified at so many points on the map oftime. Critchley leafs through thepages of his register and concludes,as did Montaigne, that the consola-tion of philosophy is “the stillness ofthe soul’s dialogue with itself. . . . It isthe achievement of a calm that ac-companies existing in the presentwithout forethought or regret. I knowof no other immortality.”

Neither do I. Which isn’t to saythat I make myself an odds on fa-vorite to show even a semblance ofthe composure to which Critchley’smortal philosophers bear immortalwitness, or that having been granteda fifty-year extension on the deadlinefor a comfortable thought or a note-worthy phrase on my next consulta-tion with the senior practitioner, anevent now apt to take place soonerrather than later, am I anywherewithin reach or in sight of the still-ness of the soul conducive to poetry.But neither do I worry about missing

8 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MAY 2009

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the deadline. Certain only that thecause of my death is one that I canneither foresee nor forestall, I’m con-tent to let the sleeping dog lie.

If the attitude is maybe nothing oth-er than a new sophistry designed toexcuse my refusal to quit smoking, oneof Critchley’s proofs of the believingblindly in a magical form of salvation,it is also the refusal to inject myselfwith the fear of death that sells the fi-nancial, pharmaceutical, and politicalproducts guaranteed to restore theyouthful bloom of immortality. I came

of age during a decade when the an-swer to the question, “Why do I haveto die?” was still being looked for in thelaboratories of literature, the cutting-edge R&D to be found in the experi-ments conducted by Shakespeare,Dickens, Auden, and Yeats translatingSophocles. Over the course of the pastfifty years the question has been re-ferred to the cosmetic surgeons, thearms manufacturers, and the hedge-fund wizards, but I haven’t found myway to Jesus or lost the habit of read-ing the ancient writers unfamiliar

with the modernized systems of risk-free metaphysics.

I know that dying is un-American,nowhere mentioned in our contractu-al agreement with providence, but toregard the mere fact of longevity asthe supreme good—without askingwhy or to what end—strikes me asfoolish, a misappropriation of time,thought, sentiment, electricity, andfrequent-flier miles. Of the $2.4 trillionassigned last year to the care and feed-ing of our health-care apparatus, halfthe sum paid the expenses of citizensin the last, often wretched, years oftheir lives. Who benefits from the in-ventory of suffering gathered in theFlorida storage facilities? Seldom thecorpses in waiting that serve as profitcenters for the insurance companies;usually not the heirs of the estateplaced as a burnt offering on the altarof Mammon in the temples of med-ical science.

Where then is the blessing to befound in the wish to live forever? Nev-er before in the history of the worldhave so many people lived as long, assafely, or as freely as those of us nowliving in the United States. Never be-fore in the history of the world have somany of those same people made them-selves sick with the fears of an imagi-nary future. We magnify the threat inall the ills the flesh is heir to, surroundourselves with surveillance cameras,declare the war on terror against anunknown enemy and an abstract noun,buy from Bernie Madoff the elixirs oflife everlasting. And what is it that weaccomplish other than the destructionof our happiness as well as the hope ofsome sort of sustainable balancing ofour account with nature, which, unlikethe Obama Administration, isn’t inthe business of arranging bailouts?

Absent a coming to terms withdeath, how do we address the ques-tions of environmental degradationand social injustice certain to denom-inate the misfortunes of the twenty-first century? Our technologists pro-vide us with new and improvedweapons and information systems, ourpoliticians with digitally enhancedsophistry and superstition, but it is fromCritchley’s council of dead philoso-phers that we’re more likely to learnhow not to murder ourselves with ourfear of the dark. n

10 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MAY 2009