I have a confession to make. Last
year, I took an AP European History class, and quite early on in the course, I
was struck with a strange burning desire to find my place along with the
powerful figures I was reading about. Yes, I wanted to see my name in a history
book. Not only did I long to do something important, influential, lasting, but
I wanted to be remembered for it thousands of years later. I wanted future
generations to read my writing in the same way that I now read Martin Luther’s
writing.
In short, I desperately wanted to
be immortal.
If you have listened to any amount
of popular music in the past twenty years, then you understand that our culture
is just as obsessed with immortality as I am. Songs constantly declare our
capacity to live eternally, often exhorting us to seize the day and embrace
immortality within the moment. Characters in books, from Homer’s Iliad to John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, express the
longing to be remembered after death, and so live forever. TV shows and movies
showcase characters like the Doctor of Doctor
Who and Edward Cullen of Twilight who
really do live forever.
We romanticize immortality. We read
about it, sing about it, think about it.
But at the same time, our culture harbors an equal and opposite
obsession with mortality.
Don’t believe me? Look at The Walking Dead, World War Z, or any of
the countless stories portraying zombies. Look at tearjerking novels such as Bridge to Terabithia or The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Look
at the countless modern stories portraying death and its consequences.
Often, immortality and mortality are
present side by side in these stories. The
Iliad paints Achilles’s great quest for immortality while simultaneously describing
the deaths of hundreds of Greek and Trojan soldiers. The Fault in Our Stars tells of Gus’s struggle to develop a legacy
and also depicts his slow battle against death by cancer. Even Doctor Who’s central character, the
Doctor, deals with the loneliness of his immortality.
We are acutely aware of our own
mortality. We speak of death often—occasionally with fear, but even more often
with a strange kind of reverence and even longing. We acknowledge that death is
a form of escape from a world which is brutal and cruel. In the words of
Alexander Hamilton from the hit musical Hamilton,
we “imagine death so much it feels more like a memory.”
In absence of death, we turn to
other means of escape into immortality—and this escape we find in art. The
genius J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the Lord
of the Rings trilogy, had a great deal to say on the subject of stories,
particularly fairy-stories, as a form of escape:
“I have claimed that Escape is one
of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them,
it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which ‘Escape’
is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism
give no warrant at all…. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also
by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in
prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks
and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside
has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it.”
Art is at its most beautiful when
we recognize the “real world” as a dark and murky prison. Once we come to that
realization, anything that is beautiful—anything that lifts our souls up in
exultation—anything that fills our hearts with a extraordinary kind of longing—becomes
a means of escape from the cell we live in.
Art is a method of containing and experiencing
immortality within a finite reality. The surprising truth is that we are
obsessed with mortality for exactly the same reason that we are obsessed with
immortality. Immortality is something beautiful but distant, ethereal but remote—and
yet somehow, we know by instinct that death is the only means by which we can
grasp immortality once and for all. Till then, we can only create little
pockets of immortality for ourselves.
When I
listen to beautiful music, I feel immortal. I touch something outside the
physical world, something impossible to describe, but something much more real
than any tangible object on earth. I experience a joy and exultation that lasts
forever.
The
question, then, is if I am capable of touching immortal joy, joy “that lasts
forever,” why do I not continue to feel this same joy all the time?
This is
firstly because immortality remains
outside of myself. The common misconception concerning immortality is that
it is a quality that man is capable of possessing—that somehow, immortality can
be contained within the human spirit. The truth is that mortal men are able to touch immortal concepts such as
goodness, truth, and beauty, but not to possess
them. How can I claim ownership of things which I cannot even comprehend?
Music, poetry, art—these are all conduits to immortality, conduits to God. They
are not within, but without. I love the music, but I cannot keep it. I experience
the joy, but it does not belong to me.
Secondly, art is only a taste of immortality. I
can touch immortality, but I cannot see it. I can imagine immortality, think
about it, attempt to describe it, but this side of the grave, I cannot know it.
Art gives meaning to finite life by granting us the tiniest taste of infinite
life.
Practically,
art has very little purpose, and yet throughout all of human history, art has
been a central part of culture. As a poet, I fully acknowledge that the
ability to write poetry is a fairly useless skill—but as I was reminded
recently by a dear friend of mine, useless things are so often the best things.
Rather than sustaining life, useless things—art, music, poetry—make life worth
living. They remind us of Real Life.
Art
continuously recalls to mind the essential fact that some things last longer
and are more powerful than death. The movie Interstellar
provides an excellent example of this concept. Two astronauts, Cooper and
Brand, face a choice between two different planets to explore, each of which
may end up being the eventual home of the human race. The trouble is that they
can only visit one planet, because they have limited resources. Cooper wants to
go to the planet which is still transmitting a signal, while Brand wants to go
to the planet where an old love of hers was last seen. Faced with all the facts
and evidence, Brand delivers a powerful philosophical argument for acting upon
her feelings rather than Cooper’s facts:
Cooper: You're a scientist,
Brand.
Brand: So listen to me when I
say that love isn't something that we invented. It's... observable, powerful.
It has to mean something.
Cooper: Love has meaning, yes.
Social utility, social bonding, child rearing...
Brand: We love people who have
died. Where's the social utility in that?
Cooper: None.
Brand: Maybe it means something
more—something we can't yet understand. Maybe it's some evidence, some artifact
of a higher dimension that we can't consciously perceive. I'm drawn across the
universe to someone I haven't seen in a decade, who I know is probably dead.
Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of
time and space.
Brand
touches here upon the most mysterious aspect of love—that it is something more
powerful, more lasting than any physical thing. It not only “transcends
dimensions of time and space,” but it transcends death itself, evidenced by the
fact that we continue to love those who
have died.
Love is immortal. Love outlasts
utility, practicality, reason. Love endures pain, survives heartbreak. Love
transcends death.
This is why
even those who do not believe in God or Heaven are not absolutely afraid of the
grave. Even the most avowed disbeliever cannot deny that some things, like
love, are stronger than death. Those who do fall into the cynical trap of
believing that death is all-powerful eventually fall into despair and even kill
themselves—because they cease to believe in immortality.
So what are
we to make of this complex relationship between immortality and mortality, life
and death? How do we ultimately reconcile our desire for the beauty of immortality
and our fascination with the escape of death?
Death cannot be the final conqueror.
But it also cannot be meaningless. It plays a part in the world, a part which
brings life and death together.
The significance of death lies in
the fact that it is a transition—a pathway from a dream world which we must
escape into a real world which is absolutely immortal. For the Christian, death
is the servant of immortality. We are free to live and die without fear,
because life is a gift from God, and death is a means to life.
1 Corinthians 15 puts it this way: “When the perishable has been clothed with the
imperishable and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written
will come to pass: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is
your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?’”
The Christian walks in an immortal
victory. He is not afraid of his own mortality, because to live forever on
earth would be a curse—but to live forever in the Real World will be
perfection. The Christian touches immortality in life through art, and will know
it someday in death through grace.
Art is a dirty window through which
we see the light outside. Death is the door through which we finally go outside
and revel in that light.
A hero of mine, C.S. Lewis, put it
in far more eloquent words than mine:
“Death opens a door out of a
little, dark room (that's all the life we have known before it) into a great,
real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet.”
No comments:
Post a Comment