Let it be understood that they both take quite a serious interest in my wellbeing. My current hematologist is a young man whose careworn heart sometimes shows through his professional composure in a way which I count to his credit. One day when I sat down for my periodic test results, I found him looking distinctly weary. When I mentioned it, he confided that a case had not gone well; that this sort of thing was to be expected in his line of work, but still.... Of course there was no more that he could say to me. As for my own case, the numbers were food for thought but not overly so. He'd see me again in three months.
Several quarters have gone by since then. Has it been a full year? Now, with the data gaining on me in gently rising waves, we entertain the idea of resuming treatment — or not, if it seems that, all things considered, it's not imperative. The last such conversation included my doctor daughter, who had gone along for the purpose of getting up to date on my case.
Then I caught a November cold that is now a December one. It occurs to me that I've never kept a cold so long since an occasion in my single life when I was foolishly bent on "just getting through" one without proper care or even heating. This time, the care and the heating are top-notch and yet the family doctor's reinforced prescriptions seem to drag me up a grade by small degrees. My capacity for just getting through, which nicely complemented my folly for so long, has become a thing of the past. I don't really doubt that I'll get over this cold and be all right till some later date. However, at the season of the year when a Victorian miser might be prompted to snarl about reducing the surplus population and we ourselves see a world plunged in cruelty and violence, it feels less morose than usual to muse a while on natural death.
The English language, not atypically among modern languages, causes us to speak of "being" dead. We say, for example, "when I'm dead," which seems to mean that death is a state and that one will someday exist in that state. We may claim that when we say dead we mean non-existent, but the I and the am make a counter-claim. When Dickens begins A Christmas Carol by proving to us that Jacob Marley "was as dead as a door-nail," he succeeds only in establishing Marley's inertness; not his nihility. Sure enough, the essence of the man presently comes calling.
How hard, really, should we try to purge every suggestion of persistent "being" from our speech and thought? By my own lights, I'm a Christian. That's an audacious way to frame a confession of faith, but it's a fact: there are Christians, and there are Christians. I must say I don't expect to wake up after death and find myself lounging on a cloud or strolling through some underpopulated meadow. I'd be surprised to find myself at all. What I expect is to be utterly transmuted for the remainder of a long cosmic journey. That idea of transmutation, whether accurate or not, is a screen through which the thinking I can never pass. And God? God I conceive to be constitutive wisdom and beckoning goodness, a spirit seen as in a glass darkly but also glimpsed in the light that
like mist o'er mountains driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.
The author of those lines, Percy Bysshe Shelley, gained a reputation for irreligious thought early in life, when he and a friend were expelled from Oxford for issuing a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism. He continued to call himself an atheist and might even have shrugged if told how his dissent from religion was to be simplified and amplified in years to come. However, the briskly materialist atheists who have claimed Shelley as one of their own would not have produced his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" (quoted above) or anything like this:
There Is No God. This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.
— Note on Queen Mab, published two years after The Necessity of Atheism
There are atheists, and there are atheists. It seems that Shelley's revolt was against organized religion and the anthropomorphic notion of God as the central figure in a creation myth — which is, after all, a human conceit.
Ebenezer Scrooge (surrogate for Dickens's predominantly Christian readership) listens to Marley's ghost speak in terms of humble Christian charity. We receive essentially the same urging from Shelley, who ends his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" with nothing less than a prayer:
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
Its calm, to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.
A spirit that binds you to fear yourself and love all humankind can be adored as intellectual beauty, but it cannot be reduced to intellect. It must be a beautiful something suspended in the intellect. Shelley doesn't differentiate that thing from the divine. Rather, he overcomes the error of thinking we see the divine in what amounts to a superior sort of graven image, an idealized humanoid projection. Religion can meet the poet on common ground by supposing individual sentience to be a lens that focuses the pervading universal Spirit with various results. His poem does impart the two most vital religious teachings, snatched from the fire of idolatry. There's no call to be scandalized by that. And to claim that the gravity of the teachings owes nothing to a sense of the divine would be disingenuous.
As I was saying, I don't expect to find my I still functioning after death. For that matter, even Marley's ghost promises no such futurity to Ebenezer Scrooge. He frightens Scrooge with a vision of life misspent and oblivion denied; the implicit alternative being life well spent and oblivion granted. That's all right. It's a pleasure to think the world will keep turning and the universe will keep doing whatever it does, with the little fillip of conjecture that one pure grain of me will be gathered in and borne swiftly on.
It's taken several days to write this, but it will take more of them to cure the cold. My body's resilience has lost the old snap. I am getting better, though, and don't doubt that before long I'll again be my ageless self tramping the countryside with my equally ageless wife. Like a child, I feel indestructible at those times when I'm not feeling rotten. I fully expect to write again. Still, mindful that the statement "There's always a next time" is not strictly true, I'll take this occasion to say that my life has been a richly blessed one that led me to the politics — and, come to think of it, the theology — of gratitude. Being part of the world is a great gift.
When death does come, I'll try to take it well. You who remain will please feel bound to fear yourself, and love all humankind.
