Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates Read online

  What more can we say? Except that we hope his philosophy is more intelligible in German, a proposition he seems to hint at in another quote:The German language speaks Being, while all the others merely speak of Being.3

  But then again, he is also on record as saying,Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.4

  Thanks for that, Marty—you gave us back our self-esteem.

  We need all the help we can get here, Daryl. Got any clues what he’s talking about?

  Huh?

  Actually there is a reason why Heidegger plays such a prominent role in the contemporary philosophy of death, and not only because a cover-to-cover reading of his masterwork, Being and Time, is the existential approximation of a near-death experience. No, Heidegger’s big contribution to the phil. of D is his injunction to confront death head-on in order to live authentically—to live honestly, realizing what life really is. Without death-consciousness, we’re only half alive. According to one scholar, Marty actually put this very clearly: If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life—and only then will I be free to become myself.5

  Heidi stresses the fact that only a human being is aware of his mortality, unlike, say, a pussycat. The latter may scratch and bite to avoid being eaten by my dog Moishe, but she is not conscious of the Big Void that awaits her if Moishe prevails. Awareness of mortality is thus unique and fundamental to the human condition, which happens to be the condition our condition is in.

  Yet most of us manage to keep this awareness cranked down and dim. We live in denial of death, and in Heidegger’s opinion, that’s not living at all. We can’t fully realize life unless we are conscious of our upcoming demise. Consider this queen of denial:

  The priest was warning his listeners about the suddenness of death. “Before another day is ended,” he thundered, “somebody in this parish may die.”

  Seated in the front row was a little old Irishwoman who laughed out loud.

  Irritated, the priest said, “What’s so funny?”

  “Well!” said the old lady,“I’m not a member of this parish.”

  “Thank goodness you’re here—

  I can’t accomplish anything unless I have a deadline.”

  MEMENTO MORI—THE ULTIMATE WEAPON AGAINST DENIAL

  Memento mori is one of those catchy alliterations that first caught on when they still spoke Latin in Rome. We both flunked conversational Latin, but we’re told it means “Remember you are mortal!” or, in a more recent translation, “Remember you are mortal, goombah!”

  In ancient times, the phrase was repeated by a slave boy who walked behind a war hero returning to the streets of Rome in a triumphant march. Its purpose was to serve as a reminder that “Okay, you’re on top of the world today, but like all of us, the day will come when you are dog meat!” As a Great Leveler, memento mori traditionally carries more weight than, say, “Hey, he still has to pull on his socks in the morning,” or “Yeah, well, even the Queen has to sit when she goes to the loo.”

  In other situations and in other eras, the M.M. was more an aide-mémoire to seize the day, to “eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (as the prophet Isaiah put it), and, in Christian times, to live virtuously because the Day of Judgment (the first Tuesday following your demise) is nigh.

  In the arts, pictorial, literary, and musical, memento mori images serve the same mnemonic purpose. Think Frans Hals’s Youth with a Skull or Holbein’s The Dance of Death (skeletons doing the hokey-pokey over a gravesite); Hamlet’s tête-à-tête with Yorick’s skull; and Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre. And then there’s a piece of installation art that until recently greeted shoppers at Jones’s Junkyard in Great Barrington, Massachusetts: a skeleton arrayed in a glass case with the legend, “As you are now, I once was; as I am now, you will be.”

  It’s enough to give you the fantods.

  Okay, it’s a no-no to deny death—we can dig that, so to speak. But leave it to Heidegger to push his idea one step further. He goes on to say that the anxiety of anticipating death, contrary to interfering with life, brings an “unshakable joy.”

  Hold it right there! You’ve got another wack job on your hands, guys! Is he actually saying, “Yippee, skippy, I will cease to exist forevermore—hot damn!”?

  Truth to tell, Daryl, Marty actually does have something interesting on his mind.

  Look at it this way: Say you’re Kevin Garnett and this is Game 7 of the NBA Finals. You’re going to play with way more intensity, way more energy, way more life, than in one of those dreary Thursday night midseason games in Charlotte. Heidegger called the latter “everydayness,” and he put it down as the ultimate drag. So let’s face it squarely, Daryl, this—right here, right now—is Game 7 of the Finals, and what a joy it is to be here!

  For Heidegger, the worst possible news would be that our souls are immortal. That would condemn us to a never-ending string of those Thursday night games in Charlotte.

  HEIDEGGER GOES COUNTRY

  Heidegger’s precept to always live in the shadow of death has been echoed by many deep thinkers. Mahatma Gandhi said, “Live as if you were going to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” And none other than the prematurely departed movie star James Dean said, “Dream as if you’ll live forever. Live as if you’ll die today.”

  But our favorite iteration is found in the lyrics of Tim McGraw’s country and western hit “Live Like You Were Dying.” The song tells the story of a man in his forties who is told by his doctor that he has a very short time to live. In the chorus, the man says to his friend:I went sky diving

  I went Rocky Mountain climbing

  I went 2.7 seconds on a bull named Fumanchu

  And I loved deeper and I spoke sweeter

  And I gave forgiveness I’d been denying

  And he said, Someday I hope you get the chance

  To live like you were dying.

  HEIDEGGER GOES HOLLYWOOD

  In the Carl Reiner comedy The Bucket List, two terminally ill sexagenarians make a break from the cancer ward to fulfill their lists of things-to-do-before-they-die. Those lists include getting tattoos, visiting the Great Wall of China, race car driving, skydiving (apparently an activity on everybody’s final wish list but ours), scaling the Himalayas, and finding the perfect woman. Along the way, the pair intone the wisdom they acquire facing death head-on, gems like, “Never pass up a bathroom, never waste a hard-on, and never trust a fart.”

  A spiritual quest it is not, but nonetheless it is living smack in the face of death. To be sure, The Bucket List does not dramatize men who are living as if they are about to die; they really are about to die. Yet to Heidegger, this would be a nondistinction: we are all about to die—exactly when is just a quibble.

  QUIBBLE

  Doctor: I have some good news and some bad news. Patient: What’s the good news?

  Doctor: The tests you took showed that you have twenty-four hours to live.

  Patient:That’s the good news? What’s the bad news? Doctor: I forgot to call you yesterday.

  QUIBBLE, QUIBBLE

  Marty goes to Doctor Lewis for a check-up. After extensive tests the doctor tells him, “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you, Marty.You only have six months to live.”

  Marty is dumbstruck. After a while he says, “That’s terrible, doctor. And I must admit to you that right now I can’t afford to pay your bill.”

  “Okay,” says Dr. Lewis,“I’ll give you a year to live.”

  The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre read Heidegger (in six straight days at a table in Les Deux Magots, according to Sartre’s waiter) and did his own riff on the existential significance of death. Sartre said the meaning of death is that “the for-itself is changed forever into an in-itself that has slipped entirely into the past.”6

  Any questions? The French are so much more suaviloquent than the rest of us, is it not so? Turns out the “for-itself ” is Jean-Paul’
s term for human consciousness, which he tells us is called “for-itself ” because it is not a thing. If it were a thing, it would be an “in-itself.”

  Why can’t these philosophers speak plain English?

  For one thing, Daryl, Sartre was French.

  Yeah, well, he still sounds a few Folies short of a Bergère.

  What Sartre means is that human beings have no “essence,” no predetermined purpose like, say, a rubber ducky does. “In themselves” human beings are nothing; rubber duckies, on the other hand, are quite something, as anyone who’s ever been stuck in a bathtub for three hours can attest. Sartre thinks a key difference between human beings and the duckies is that we humans invent our own essence by choosing to be what we want to be. There are other differences too, of course. But we humans are for ourselves, self-created, rather than in ourselves, created for a fixed purpose.

  Or at least that’s the way we ought to be—always freely reinventing ourselves. But, alas, most of us have this nasty habit of wanting to be a thing—no, not a table-thing or a wall-lamp-thing or a bathtub-thing, but a human-role-thing, like dissolving our identity into our profession or our nationality or our reputation on the golf course. In this way, we slip into inauthenticity, a kind of living death, like Sartre’s famous waiter, who thinks that waiterhood actually defines his essence. Silly garçon. He fails to see that the possibility of freedom—the possibility to transcend what he’s become—is always there.

  Until he really dies, that is. At that point, we all become things. Then we do have a stamped-on essence: to wit, the essence of dead meat.

  LOSS OF FOR-ITSELFNESS

  “The turkeys in your frozen-food section seem so small. Do they get any bigger?”

  “No, ma’am, they’re dead.”

  { 5 }

  Spin Your Own Immortality

  Listen, guys, my angst meter just went on red alert, so how about a little lighten-up break? Like, have you guys heard any good jokes lately?

  Geez, Daryl, we’re not sure the existentialists would approve of blowing off angst just when it’s building up steam. But we have to agree, a little break wouldn’t hurt. We’ll slide down Ernest Becker’s list of immortality systems to one that has an all too obvious shortcoming, but also just happens to be teeming with some of our favorite gags. We’re talking about the so-called immortality that comes from being remembered by our survivors.

  First, a couple of words from the sages:

  “Why should I care about posterity? What’s posterity ever done for me?”

  That one’s from Groucho Marx. And here’s a topper from his philosophical godson, Woody Allen:

  “I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”

  The sages’ salient point is that living on in the hearts and minds of our survivors fails to meet a crucial criterion for what most of us want to mean by “immortality”: it lacks eternal ego consciousness. You may be living on in others’ minds, but you won’t have one of your own.

  But one thing Becker fails to address is the relative handiness of living eternally through memorials. Unlike, say, assuring yourself a place in Heaven, here-on-earth commemorations have a user-friendly system and a ready-made infrastructure. Memorializing yourself these days is easy by Googling, say, sculptors “statue on stallion” “Bayonne, NJ.”

  A bigger-than-life statue of yourself in the middle of a park is always a good way to achieve this kind of immortality. All you have to do is call your local sculptor and deposit a few mill in the city coffers. A building or boulevard bearing your name does the trick too. And a lengthy biography by a Yale professor, complete with photographs and thirty pages of endnotes, is also neat. But unfortunately there is only so much public park space, so many boulevards, and so many willing Yale professors, not to mention the fact that after burial costs, few of us will have millions in disposable income left over for public monuments.

  That leaves the rest of us with obituaries, eulogies, high-production-value funerals, last wills and testaments, and last words as memorabilia media. Apart from these mini-marks in the sand, about all we can expect to get embedded in the minds and hearts of those who knew us—at least, beyond our immediate family and closest friends—is something like, “That Daryl, he sure was a cut-up.” And the uncomfortable truth is that within a generation that probably will be reduced to, “Didn’t there used to be a guy named Daryl around here somewhere?”

  Gags, guys! I’m not feeling any uplift yet!

  Hang in there, Daryl. It’s on the way. But you can’t have a gag without a setup.

  Anyway, a fascinating obituary or a few moving, heartfelt eulogies or a well-turned last phrase have much to be said for them. Principally, they give our survivors a hook on which to hang their memories of us. Therefore you may want to consider a few practical ways we actually can shape this little piece of eternity.

  Consider the pitfalls of a poorly planned memorial service:

  Stanley Goldfarb died and his relatives and the congregation gathered for an evening of prayers and mourning. When the time came for the congregation to offer eulogies, no one stirred. After waiting several minutes, the rabbi became vexed; he reminded them that it was their duty to find something good to say in Goldfarb’s memory. “Someone must have something nice to say about him!” After another period of silence, an old man rose in the back and stammered:“I’ll say this for old Stanley. His brother, Morris, was worse.”

  Few of us get to be spectators at our own funerals, but that doesn’t stop many maximum control types from making detailed preparations for them, including ghostwriting (so to speak) their own eulogies. They may have a point.

  A careful planner of one’s own funeral is also aware of common gravesite mishaps, starting with settling for a discount mortician.

  Mickey has just passed away and his wife, Judy, goes to the mortuary. As soon as Judy sees her husband she starts crying. An attendant tries to comfort her. Through her tears Judy explains that Mickey is wearing a black suit, and he always wanted to be buried in a blue suit. The attendant explains that they always put the bodies in a black suit as standard procedure, but he’ll see what he can do.

  The next day, when Judy returns to the mortuary to have one last moment with Mickey, she smiles through her tears—Mickey is now wearing a blue suit. Judy asks the attendant,“How did you manage to get hold of that nice blue suit?”

  “Well, yesterday, after you left, a man about your husband’s size was brought in, and he was wearing a blue suit. His wife was very upset, as he had always wanted to be buried in a black suit,” the attendant replied. “After that, it was simply a matter of swapping the heads around.”

  “He was a man of simple tastes—

  baked macaroni, steamed cabbage, wax beans,

  boiled onions, and corn fritters.”

  And speaking of burial get-ups, some special economic questions need to be addressed here, like, if you are buried in a rented tuxedo, at what point do you own it?

  A first-rate funeral needs to be choreographed as flawlessly as a production of Swan Lake. One glitch and that’s all the attendees will remember about you, instead of your years of devoted service to the Keep Bayonne Green Association.

  Jack had passed away and his funeral service was being held at Woodlawn Cemetery. Jennifer, his wife for over forty years, had tears in her eyes. At the end of the service, as the coffin was being wheeled out, the trolley accidentally bumped into the door frame. To everyone’s total shock, they heard a faint moaning coming from inside the coffin. They quickly opened it and found Jack alive. Wonder of wonders—a miracle if ever there was one.

  Jenny and Jack lived together for ten more years and then Jack died. The ceremony was again held at Woodlawn. At the end of the service, as the coffin was being wheeled out on the trolley, Jenny shouted,“Watch out for that door frame!”

  Another major consideration for a memorable funeral is turnout. Empty pews translate into low-buzz immortalit
y. If at all possible, schedule your funeral for an uneventful day.

  Joe gets a ticket to the Super Bowl from his company, but when he gets there, his seat is in the last row in the corner of the stadium. Halfway through the first quarter, Joe sees through his binoculars an empty seat ten rows off the field, right on the fifty-yard line. He decides to take a chance, and makes his way to the empty seat.

  As he sits down, Joe says to the guy sitting next to him, “Excuse me, is anybody sitting here?”

  The guy says, “No.”

  Joe says, “This is incredible! Who in their right mind would have a seat like this for the Super Bowl and not use it?”

  The guy says, “Well, actually, the seat belongs to me. I was supposed to come with my wife, but she passed away.This is the first Super Bowl we haven’t seen together since we got married in 1967.”

  Joe says, “That’s really sad. But couldn’t you find anyone to take the seat? A friend, or a close relative?”

  The guy says, “No, they’re all at the funeral.”

  DEAD AND IN COLOR!

  When it comes to immortalizing a life story, a significant problem with obituaries, eulogies, last words, and even headstones is durability. In fact, it has been demonstrated that the average headstone lasts roughly a millennium less than the average fruitcake. Fortunately, the digital world has changed all that.

  Enter Hollywood Forever, a thriving California graveyard that guarantees eternal life in the form of a eulogy posted eternally on the Net. No, really, we’re not kidding. And it’s not just some cookie-cutter, run-of-the-mill eulogy either, but a full-color movie memoir with snappy cuts and really gorgeous background music, like Barbra Streisand warbling “Memories.”