LITTLE ROCK — Life is petty accumulation and grave loss; a scurry to collect things-houses, cars, Blackberrys, Learjets, the approbation of the masses-tempered in moments by the understanding that you and everyone you ever cared about will die. In time, all worlds ash over and freeze, or blow apart in fire.
Each of us carries the terrible secret of mortality, the unvoiced fact of our provisional existence. We would like our children to outlive us, we would like a peaceful passage and the transient memories of a life well lived by whatever lights we imagine that to be. Some of us are fortunate enough to have a strong faith in something larger that waits beyond the limits of our understanding, to receive us and explain all mystery.
I do not know what happens when people die. And I cannot imagine what mad gods pillage our lot, or why they feel it necessary to try us with the murder of innocents. I know good people who have come to an accommodation with our savage universe, who understand all misery as the strange work of an ultimately benevolent being whose mind cannot be known by creatures as simple and flawed as ourselves. Death is also the cessation of pain, a grace bestowed, the beginning of a longedfor eternity insulated from this brutish realm.
If I cannot quite imagine that, I can understand and respect it. And hope that when I die, whatever unimagined devil comes to claim my soulwill have at least a human measure of mercy. I should hope that He who numbers the sparrows and tracks the progress of a billion stars should not begrudge me my terror and my questions. He who knows my heart would need no testimony or profession of fidelity. Leaving the words unformed does not mitigate the sin, so why not wonder why it is we live to die and the worst can and does happen to the best of us?
We had dinner with a friend last week; he'd been to the funeral of a child the week before. We didn't know it then but that same day a 6-year-old close to another friend died after a long struggle. That night we talked about Voltaire's Candide, the naive student of Dr. Pangloss, who believes that God has created for us "the best of all possible worlds."
Pangloss was obviously based on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the 17th-century German polymath who espoused a philosophy called "Optimism," which held that since a benevolent God created the world, he musthave made it as perfect as divinely possible. So whatever happened in the world must necessarily be "for the best," even if human understanding is insufficient to see how.
Voltaire wrote Candide as a satirical attack on Leibniz (and almost every institution of French society), after a crisis of faith occasioned by an earthquake that struck Lisbon on Nov. 1, 1755 (All Saints Day). The quake killed as many as 60,000 people and leveled the city.
Many people saw the earthquake as a manifestation of God's wrath-Catholics saw it as invited by Portuguese sinfulness; Protestants assumed it had to do with Portugal being a Catholic country. (This tradition of victim-blaming continues through the work of Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church, which proclaimed its intention to picket the funerals of Arkansans killed in the recent "whirlwinds," which they contend were visited on our state by God for our "sodomite sins.")
Voltaire took the natural catastrophe as further evidence of the absence of any controlling, benign deity who touted up the works of the virtuous and demerits of the sinful. He saw a world where accidents occurred, where Optimism was unfounded. We could hope for a better life, but that hope had no practical effect.
The month after the Lisbon earthquake, Voltaire finished his "Poem on the Lisbon Disaster," which begins:
And can you then impute a sinful deed
To babes who on their mothers' bosoms bleed?
Was then more vice in fallen Lisbon found,
Than Paris, where voluptuous joys abound?
Was less debauchery to London known,
Where opulence luxurious holds the throne?
People wounded by tragedy need comfort, and whatever provides them comfort is in a real sense a blessing. People need shoulders and soft touches, kind eyes and handkerchiefs. We all ought to try to be better to each other, to understand that pain is the common denominator of human experience. There is nothing to be gained by denigrating the tightly clutched articles of another's faith.
This mightn't be the best of all possible worlds, but it is the only world we have-sad and ravaged it may be, blasted here and there beyond all hope of repair, yet it wobbles on. Dylan Thomas refused to mourn the death of the child burned up in a V2 rocket attack on London by the Nazis, not because the lost life was not precious, but because to do so would divert energy from the essential job at hand , whether it be something as grand as the struggle against totalitarian evil or the simple daily struggle to continue our absurd journey.
At least my life has often felt absurd.I have discussed Vermeer in dugouts with left-handers. I have followed police detectives into grisly crime scenes. I've sat face to face with murderers and been moved by their self-pitying rationalizations. I once played guitar on the Merv Griffin Show. I don't know what will happen next and I'm curious to see.
It will not all be pretty. Most of us, I think, are capable of atrocity, of behaving like Good Germans or the subjects of the Milgram experiment. The bad guys are not so different than we are-a few have been stripped of their empathetic apparatus, some of them are sociopaths-but most are desperate and fearful and doing what they have convinced themselves they must do.
Life is a losing proposition-no one gets to cash in their winnings as he walks away at the end of the evening. No one beats the house, no one gets out alive. We play largely because we can't see what else to do.
There are no pretty words that can explain or mitigate your loss. That scooped-out feeling at the end of your tears? I don't know that it ever completely goes away.
But I think it is as they say, that sadness is a part of life, and though words can sentimentalize and even mawken loss, they are one of the few instruments we can use to signal each other through the falling darkness. They are as well meant as they are insufficient.
Perspective, Pages 99 on 05/18/2008