How to Die by Ray Robertson

Author:Ray Robertson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2019-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

Where is it I’ve read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, an eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and to live! Life, whatever it may be!

And would one necessarily be doomed to boredom? Wouldn’t an infinite amount of time mean an infinite number of possibilities? If, for example, after a couple of hundred years as a novelist, what would stop one from doing an occupational about-face and trying out what it would be like to dedicate oneself to something a little less self-absorbing—becoming a firefighter, say, or an elementary schoolteacher? And if after a few decades one decided that giving really isn’t better than receiving, one could always return to the sedentary solitariness of the writer’s life, with the added bonus of having gained some valuable first-hand experience to take back to one’s desk. One of the disadvantages of being an author is the difficulty of mastering one’s craft and the resultant need to spend the majority of one’s life sitting in front of a computer screen. With an infinite amount of time, however, getting out into the world and getting one’s hands experientially dirty wouldn’t be a problem. One could have one’s art-for-art’s sake cake and eat it too.

There are as many other buts, however, as there are reasons to want them to exist. Such as: Okay, I myself might one day die, never to literally be me ever again, but a part of me will live on, through my children. But even if we grant that your surname will survive for a few further generations, or that one’s receding hairline and genetic tendency toward type 1 diabetes might be passed down to your children’s children’s children, or that your picture will sit framed, if usually ignored, on your grandchildren’s living room mantle piece, it’s still not you. A name, a disease, a photograph: these aren’t the same thing as being alive. And if your primary reason for procreating isn’t the desire to experience the unique role of mother or father, but, instead, to propagate your personal identity (however fruitlessly, as noted), you do so because you’ve tacitly admitted that your own life simply isn’t memorable enough to get the job done. Bertrand Russell, from The Conquest of Happiness:

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