Early Holiday

I

AFTER a meeting in Berlin of an International Medical Conference at which Dr, X had given a paper, one of our great neurologists congratulated him and said that although he was going to London for a month he hoped to see the doctor on his return. Dr. X explained that he would not be in Berlin at that time. ‘Oh,’ said the neurologist, ‘you’re taking an early holiday?’

‘Yes,’ quietly answered the German surgeon, ‘ I am taking an early holiday. I have cancer and can be sure of only another ten days.’ When the neurologist returned to Berlin at the end of the month, Dr. X had been dead two weeks and six days.

As a probable sharer in Dr. X’s early holiday, death has recently become to me as personal a reality as life, and the unescapable recognition of the nature of death to a human being still closely allied to life has brought an experience so immediate and so deeply compensating that I am impelled to record it.

Happily or unhappily, when the time comes for most of us to face death the harshness of its impact has been mitigated by drugs, delirium, or by the various and, for the most part, distorting inroads of illness itself. Consequently we are denied full awareness of the experience through which we are passing.

For me this is apparently not to be true. A year ago I was living what is called a normal life, my present fulfilled, my future an accepted certainty toward which my crowded days confidently directed themselves. To-day I am invalided out by one of the few diseases which are still described by that almost obsolete adjective, ‘incurable.’ The fact that it is a form of paralysis that will in all likelihood leave my mind unimpaired, but may at any time affect my heart, or may, by a more fragmentary mortality, deprive me of vision, voice, hearing, or any of those other exquisitely mechanized functions which we accept as commonplace, endows my present existence with an almost intolerable value — as every thought, sight, sound, touch, and emotion becomes burdened with potential finality.

As the nature of my illness leaves me free from the necessity of isolation which danger of contagion would impose, and from the fear of having transmitted it to my children, the circumstance in which I find myself is an essentially personal one involving only those responsibilities inherent in my individual reaction to life and to death. I am neither psychologist, scientist, nor philosopher enough to discover the factors that have evolved the self which seeks as its great necessity a swift and complete adaptation to the kaleidoscopic shifting of the external pattern, and which finds adequate and esoteric reward in facing uncompromisingly that pattern, no matter how unacceptable its presentation may be. Nevertheless, the primary reaction to the intrusion of death into a design that had heretofore included only the vibrant and familiar colors of life was an almost violent effort to adapt the inner identity, which was I, to the momentarily alien situation. As I hurriedly projected into the future what small protection and wisdom of planning were possible for my two children, as I rather frantically attempted to minimize for them the inevitable distress of the sheer business of dying, I was reminded of the theatre programme notes which warn us not to run but to walk to the nearest exit.

II

It may have been this incongruous orderliness that postponed the actual impact of the knowledge that I was fatally ill. When, after deciding such important questions as the choice of boarding schools for my children, and whether cremation adds to or subtracts from the painfulness of actual bodily death to young minds, I was faced with the more personal effect of my own death upon myself, the question had already retreated into the realm of the abstract. I was either spared or deprived of the conflict occasioned by the practical and individual acceptance of the universal experience.

If the familiar became a phantom thrusting itself at me with a force that made me feel again and again like the old woman in Mother Goose who cried, ‘Oh mercy, mercy, do this be I?’ it was only for a while. If occasionally I was threatened with the obvious danger of seeing myself as one set apart under a peculiarly imminent doom, it was not long possible to claim so egocentric a rôle. The self-pity that prompted me to sadness as I looked at a dawn, a sunset, or my children’s faces — perhaps for the last time — soon spent itself and I remembered to recognize my special privilege of so consciously sharing the command that every living creature shall be dependent on a mortal body for a mortal life.

It was revealing, however, to discover how utterly I had committed myself to the civilized convention that disciplines us to ignore death in loyalty to life; how furtively in health I had, in common with my race, dealt with the whole question of dying.

For generations most of us have been sheltered by the comforting orthodoxy of immortality, and our refusal to accept the reality of death has become a precept of our religious teaching. In proportion to our emphasis on the spiritual, our reluctance to consider the fact of death in any other light than that of an illusion has increased. For some of us to-day such orthodoxy remains a possibility. For many of us, committed to a more stark creed, immortality no longer finds a place in our consideration of probabilities. It is not that we arbitrarily presume to claim that there is no survival after death; rather, the question of that survival becomes immaterial to the practical philosophy we are struggling to evolve. It is a problem toward whose solution we are disinclined to direct our effort — a problem, consequently, which holds for many of us a purely academic, artificial, and atavistic interest. Our attitude of almost irreverent laissez faire may also be an unconscious result of a habit of efficiency which hesitates to take energy from immediate living to apply toward a question whose answer is immutable and independent of our control.

Personally, I have had little curiosity as to whether a mystic and intangible part of my self will survive. Even when death is most imminent, I know no groping cry toward survival. Bewildered, as all my life I have been, at my own and other people’s inadequacy in approximating a realization of the richness of this life, I am doubly bewildered at the suggestion of an eternal experience not unlike it.

III

Even those of us who deny ourselves faith in immortality continue, however, to evade the reality of death by veiling it in that greatest of all evasions— mystery. If I dispense with immortality, it is the sheerest nonsense to call death a mystery, for if I accept mortality and its full implications, I accept the process of death as I know it. I accept provable, finite destruction; the outbreathing of the last breath; the permanent interruption of the rhythm of the body; the ephemeral moment during which light illumines the face — the moment for the taking of death masks. I accept the subsequent swift and almost imperceptible invasion of unreality that substitutes for identity and sex the unique humility of dramatic alteration into ‘it — the body.’ I accept the fact that even the most translucent flesh rots from the bones, leaving them triumphantly clean, architecturally and persistently beautiful. I accept the fact that the cells, which an hour before housed thought, have betrayed it. I accept the fact that the body, the thought, the spirit, whose coördination was a self, are soon to be no more.

In this literal acceptance of death I now find the only authentic preface to living — in my case a preface whose tardiness I regret with such conviction that I would introduce its understanding into the curriculum of kindergartens, and consider a child unprepared for life until the simplicity of death had been well learned. So much that needlessly complicates life would then not have to be learned. A plan would be laid for heroic living in which there would be no need for courage.

Recognizing that we are born pregnant with death, we should be released from our pitiful stubborn attempts at aborting the uncheatable conception. We should know that no man dies as reluctantly as he is born; that life is the shadow of death as surely as death is the shadow of life; that the two shadows and the two realities merge and become inseparable components of experience; that to deny one is to deny the other, to accept one is to accept the full implication and inherent reality of the other; that their mutuality is greater than their difference; that there are as many gradations of dying as of living, but that in their respective crescendos they inevitably meet.

IV

With the knowledge that my familiar flesh would so soon experience destruction, I became blindingly conscious of its minute and untiringly effective functioning. The sheer physiology of a rhythm that year after year had closed and unclosed, raised and lowered eyes that would soon stare unblinking and unseeing excited me beyond any miracle. The simple sequence of thought and impulse involved in an inarticulated desire, whether it be to rise from a chair and walk across the room or to express romance in a bodily symbol, seemed to me intolerably glorious.

I knew suddenly that it was right that upon myself I should place an incalculable value, that it was right that every human being should know an intimate pride. I saw for the first time that I stood on feet exquisitely adapted to curve over the larger arch of earth. I knew that if all the earth were cut close around those feet and lifted away, or magically dissolved, and if the sky were taken away, if everything, everything except myself were taken away, a fragment of everything would be left — as long as I remained. The sky, the sunset, the meadow, the clover, even the scent of the clover, the bark of a distant dog, the silver birch tree that once I saw standing alone in a furrowed field, every voice I had ever heard, every face I had ever seen, every manifestation of life that I had ever witnessed or experienced, all would survive while I survived; and this privilege of being the living focus of all life I knew to be true of every creature that thinks and sees and hears and feels and remembers.

But let me be removed, as I shall soon be removed, and with me I take out of this universe a distillation of its very essence, a breath of its air, a scent of every garden through which I have walked, a clod of the earth I now tread, something of every human being I have known or loved or brushed by in the crowded streets.

For when a human being dies, all things living die a little.

V

I should have expected to share in the face of death the panorama of life that proverbially presents itself to a drowning man, but the scroll of the years refused to unfurl. Their hidden record betrayed them, however, by burdening present moments with an anonymous significance. Repeatedly I was made aware that every impression, every contact, had incorporated itself into myself by a law of mysterious but complete assimilation, until my previous selves with their contemporary experience had endowed my present self with dimension. They were myself, but so unified, so drawn into the present, that there could be no separation of episode. Time, necessary as an impulse and chart to memory, did not exist. Therefore, not only was my future, by the imminence of death, removed, but in a strangely satisfying way my past no longer existed, except in the expanded vitality of the present. For instance, the scent of sumac, reviving subtly my early childhood spent in Kentucky where it grew profligately, instead of revealing a remembered childhood, aroused with its pungency an awareness of my present enriched maturity, and only by a mental feat could I summon up even the slightest affinity between the whiff of reddened shrubbery and the emotional depths it set free.

With the future denied and with the past automatically denying itself, it was as though the moment, transient and ephemeral in the laws of time, challenged those very laws and, reaching out across boundaries dissolved by the removal of past and future, became reality, infinite and precious. A concentrated urgency impelled each second into æons that frustrated time.

In a present so powerfully weighted, where was there room for even a thin thread of concern about immortality?

VI

A more immediate question, however, — not unassociated, by reason of my austerely religious background and inheritance, with that of immortality, — presented itself. I suppose that most of us struggle, either consciously or unconsciously, to recapture the original entity that has suffered an artificial separation into three alien elements, mind, spirit, and body — an unnatural cataloguing which is one of the few real perversions of civilization and religion. Although in health my most determined effort had been Inward reintegrating myself, in illness I became aware of the temptation to retain a spirit and mind freed and secure from the body toward which for years I had directed their reluctant alliance.

Should I, who had accepted the lavish offerings that the body had yielded to me in its health, now in its extremity ignore as far as possible its existence? Should I, who had received vision, fragrance, music, voices, a sequence of external and emotional beauty, manifestations possible only through the medium of this subtle sensitive body, now churlishly refuse it coördination ? Should I, who had, through the response of that body to life, borne life itself, now deny its pain, its weariness, its imminent dissolution?

Rather I chose deliberately to hurl into the doomed flesh the strength of thought, the leaven of soul, ‘the expense of spirit.’ As though by a gallant effort to continue its habit of generosity to me, the body in its illness instinctively associated itself so inalienably with all transient phenomena that the chasm of the Great Aloneness was miraculously bridged. In my greatest necessity it was the flesh that made me know myself to be bound closely in fate and in transient glory with trees, with gardens, with birds, with beasts, with humanity itself; it was the flesh that initiated my spirit into so deep an intimacy with life that it could look unabashed upon Yorick’s skull, knowing it to be beautiful with the universal and shared inevitability of death.

In the last analysis the flesh, granted an emphasis long denied, welded my disintegrated heritage into a self that is tardily willing and able to accept all experience as gain and can acknowledge no essential loss. It was through the flesh that I relearned that the reward of each experience is inherent in the impact of the experience itself; and if it is the flesh that teaches me of pain and of death, it was the flesh, too, that taught me of happiness and of life.

And the spirit? And the mind? We do not yet know what they are or where they live. But it is not unlikely that for their dwelling place they choose the body which lives — and dies.