“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. ” –Shakespeare, Macbeth
Well, at some point the tomorrows do stop creeping for us as individuals. Mortality interests me but doesn’t particularly depress me. I have a very personal sense of the afterlife: nonexistence is impossible for me to imagine. Just trying to imagine it seems to preclude it: I’m not really imagining death; I’m someone who is imagining something (It’s like trying not to think of pink elephants: the very attempt to not think of them makes you think of them). I told this to a religion teacher when I was young (I actually got the idea from my brother and agreed with it), and the teacher replied that it shows I have a strong sense of self. So, I guess my rationale for immortality is that my ego is too big to accept death as a finality. Put that in your theological proof and smoke it. Haha.
I suppose Ambrose Bierce tried to disabuse people like me of our tenacious sense of continuing life with his famous 1890 short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” a tale whose basic narrative device was emulated by many fiction writers after him. What happens at the point of death, and how exactly does life stop? The simplest syllogism and the one often used to introduce students to this logical technique may also be the hardest one for some of us to accept: “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.”
(Have you heard Steve Martin’s joke about Socrates? Sentenced to execution by the people of Athens, Socrates is presented with a chalice filled with a deadly hemlock solution. He takes a hearty quaff and is asked by witnesses, “Socrates, now that you have drunk the hemlock, do you have any final words of wisdom for us?” He replies, “hemlock?! No one told me this was hemlock!”)
Death was on my mind last night because I watched this new trippy movie called “She Dies Tomorrow” about a young woman who suddenly has a sense of her own imminent death and seems to infect other people with it. Sounds like a real Debbie Downer, a Typhoid Mary, or a Coronavirus Cathy. I think this woman would be a cue for me to go back to the drawing board and/or the dating website. Sorry. I don’t think I’m misogynistic. Just like to tell jokes, and there is sometimes collateral damage.
Seriously though, this new movie is pretty good if you like slow-burn, meditative, and psychological fare. It reminded me a bit of the psychological horror film from a few years back called “It Follows” in that both movies deal with the subtle ways that we can negatively affect the people we interact with socially. Horror is often allegorical. I can’t help thinking of the public reaction to the current virus problem as being in some way allegorical. Is it really a respiratory infection that is causing all the alarm or is it something less physical?
The new movie quotes Albert Camus that “man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.” Maybe we think too much, especially when much of our thought is elaborate lying.
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