To Check Out But Never Leave
A friend asked, “What are you going to write about today?” I had a vague idea which I vaguely described to him.
The look back at forty years or so of establishing and operating a company, the challenges, some failures, and those successes -now come into focus. My life appears as the individualized version, of what every one of us experiences.
We seek in the public sphere, we “fall” there in order to forget.
What were we, what was I trying to forget? Was I trying to be everyone and no one at the same time? What was my mask-of-success concealing? “This” is a world, in which we all are “at home” a socially fabricated world in which you help me to forget that I and all of this – is going to end…
I think the Eagles said the same thing, said it even better.
The human being flees
from its self-being
held out into nothing,
from self-being as individualized,
in order to exist as
“the social one”
within the
“public” world.
One exists
in such a way
that one can be
anyone and no one.
In the busi-ness
of the social world
one is oblivious
of the death, or nothing,
at the ground of the self and avoids
thinking of self-being
as being-to-the-end.
This condition Heidegger
calls “falling,”…
Both the person who is living
the healthiest of lives in the public sphere
and the progressive who is working
toward a hoped for future society
exist in this
“falling.”
As das Man,
one lives in the mode of care
for the business of the so-called world,
and feels at home
in the world.
One’s basic existence
is at home in the world
whether one rejoices or grieves,
whether in joy or sadness.
The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, by Nishitani Keiji, trans by Graham Parkes and Setsuko Aihara, page 166
2 thoughts on “To Check Out But Never Leave”
The mask of death is one that permeates the pages of many novels. The Portrait of Dorian Gray comes to mind. This mask also remains present in both my waking and sleeping hours on a daily basis. Time taps us all on the shoulder and like the crusader in The Seventh Seal we all hear the footsteps of death trailing behind us. At least at this point, I’m not frightened by the prospect. Perhaps I will be in a few years, but for now it saddens me more than anything else. What I credit this sense of sadness to is my damned, overwhelming curiosity about life and the world. Each day I spend time (as do you Jerry) trying to unravel the mysteries of “why” and “where” and “how”. And so I want to cheat the Reaper so I can learn more, to garner that greater understanding of those eternal, unanswerable questions.
Others, of course, would like to extend their lives for the purposes of gathering greater wealth, not of knowledge, but of money, power, and objects. Elon Musk springs to mind as the human form of a black hole where not even light can escape his grasping desperate fingers. To veer into the fictional (sort of) realm of science, there is no doubt in my mind that the super wealthy tech giants are working on robotic AI versions of themselves so they can extend their lust for more through semi-immortal selves, though I digress.
Back to our dilemma which is the ever-narrowing window through which we can exercise that curiosity in this, our world, our home, our one and only chance to experience this brief iteration of consciousness. What an extraordinary opportunity.
Ah death. That is a topic worthy of protracted investigation. Is is natural that we fear death, or is the fear carried by culture, a lesson that is learned and reinforced in many small ways? In any case I think that fear of non-being is a ghost that gets in the way of coming to our better selves, to becoming more human. Why wreak havoc in this life, because you absolutely deny that you have an expiration date, and that you will leave in that same way that you came?
As you mentioned much literature involves story telling that meditates upon finitude, the unknowable of one’s own death. Buddhism also is a tradition of thought that dedicates much attention to death. Mahayana Buddhism in particular is based on the notion of emptiness, that nothing at all, a pure void is foundation to all things. This can be understood as an awesome insight, which allows for every bit of creativity that we can muster, and enjoy. The contrast obviously, is to a god that imposes rigid boundaries upon what is possible.
I want to mention a passage from the T. S. Eliot poem East Coker. The poem is one philosophical reflection upon death after another, all stitched together. This one is stunning in linguistic beauty: