Economy and the Future : A Crisis of Faith by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Michigan State University Press

Expecting Catastrophe

When I was a child, I thought that death was a continuous passage from one state into another, a gradual crossing over into unconsciousness: the senses grow dull, the body loses its strength, the faculties slowly dim. There is no radical break in this transition, no discontinuity, no catastrophe—no more than when water, the moment it reaches a critical point, passes without any discontinuity from the liquid to the gas phase. Today I believe that nothing could be more false. One dies at the very moment when one wishes most to live. Jean de la Fontaine expressed the same idea marvelously well in his fable “Death and the Dying Man.” The moral of the fable is just this: “Most loath to die are those most close to death.”14

Death is a catastrophe foretold. Atropos, the inexorable fate of Greek mythology, the one who cuts the thread of destiny, merely neglected to tell us the hour and the day. Our ignorance has incalculable consequences. Some people welcome it, believing that it permits them to live more freely, for they liken an unknown end to an indeterminate end, and so to the absence of an end. “Whatever certainty there is in death,” La Bruyère remarked, “is mitigated to some extent by that which is uncertain, by an indefiniteness in time that has something of the infinite about it.”15 Others are troubled by the thought that this indeterminacy may keep them from knowing themselves. One thinks of the story told of Jorge Luis Borges, on being asked yet again by an interviewer to say something about himself. “Say something about myself? But I know nothing about myself—not even the date of my death!” Knowing what we know now, we may imagine having been there when the interview took place and, availing ourselves of the future perfect—that miraculous tense that transforms the future into the past—saying to ourselves, “When Borges dies, seven years and three months will have elapsed since he made this memorable remark.” But this is a luxury that was not available to Borges himself.

It is this waiting period, the time that stands between us and a catastrophe whose occurrence we know to be inevitable but whose exact date is unknown to us, that I wish now to examine more closely. Paradoxically, although the catastrophe will come as a surprise the moment it occurs, the fact that it will come as a surprise is not, or should not be, a surprise. We are aware of heading inexorably toward the end, but since its precise location is not known, we can always hope that the end is not yet near. Then, suddenly, without warning, it sneaks up on us when we least expect it. The most interesting case involves a traveler who finds that the farther he advances along his route, the greater the objective reasons he has for supposing that the time that remains before he reaches his destination is increasing—as if the end point of his journey were moving away from him more rapidly than he is approaching it.

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