November 1, 2009

  • This Is the Way the World Ends

    I was seven years old when I first saw, for one terrible moment, the absolute empty void that I believe death would be.

    I was not raised religious or nonreligious. I was fortunate in that my parents did not indoctrinate me when I was a young, impressionable child. Many wrong things I learned at the age took me years and many philosophy classes to unlearn. But, happily, religion was left to me to figure out for myself what I believed in, not what my parents believed. I was told many stories, some religious and some not religious, but no story was ever declared to me as fact. I am an atheist, but I wasn’t always one.

    What happens when a person dies? The body rots, the brain decomposes into dust, and I have seen enough psychological studies where individuals with injury to their brain change fundamentally. The personality changes, the memory is gone, it seems that any part of what we experience as a soul? a consciousness? can vanish if you only destroy a section of brain. Have I ever died? No. But I have been not alive. I wasn’t alive before I was born, or conceived, or whatever anyone believes is the beginning of life. That’s not important here. What is important is that once upon a time, I didn’t exist, and I can remember nothing of a time when I didn’t exist. It is empty and dark and huge and vast and tiny. It may have been huge or tiny; I cannot tell because I have no experience of it. It is vast because I’ve read and learned of the centuries and people and ages stretching millions, billions of years, that I shall never experience. The world did not exist to me then. It has only existed to me these past years, these so-very-few all-too-short years. Why would death be any different? How could I expect to keep my identity, my self, my consciousness after life, when I had it not before life?

    Of course, when I was seven, I did not know of psychology and history and cosmology. All I knew was a common sense unadulterated by religious teachings. And common sense dictated that I had no reason to believe I would exist after I die.

    It was terrifying. On that black December night, I lay awake, horror-struck, and tried for any loophole that might save me from nonexistence. At first, I thought I could simply ask my parents to stop death, and I was always confused when it produced no satisfactory response. I’d seen a child’s Christmas special on TV, where Santa Claus grew up and became a philanthropist and grew old. Just as death, in the form of a robe-clad scythe-wielding shadow, came to take Santa Claus, then a god-figure stopped him, saying, Santa Claus will not die. In vain, I thought that if I were as good as Santa Claus, I might too be granted eternal life. Then I thought, not even Beethoven was granted immortality; how could I become greater than Beethoven? (It is the fate of every child like me to study piano from an early age. Parents from my background are like that.)

    A second-grade child cannot very well tell between wish and reality. I wanted god to exist. I wanted it so badly that I thought I believed it. I had read a child’s happy filtered picture-book Bible, and I tried to become Christian. But even then, I did not believe in heaven. I did not ask god to take my soul to heaven. I asked him to let me live forever, and to let everyone and everything in the world live forever, and to let everyone and everything that has ever lived to return to life, and for everyone to live in youth. It just didn’t occur to me to ask about heaven. Every night before I went to sleep, I would pray. There were days when I was tired, when I simply fell asleep, and then I worried that god would be angry with me the next day. Suggestion is a powerful tool. For quite a while, it seemed to me that whenever I fell asleep without praying, god would punish me by making me bad at piano for a day. (Even a story-book Bible conveys pretty clearly the Christian god’s punishing nature.) I kept track of how many prayers I’d missed, vowing to make them up. I got up to 170 or 180 something over the course of two or three years; they started building up faster as my faith weakened. I became afraid to sleep with the hallway light off, so I’d leave it on and open my room door wide. I worried that if my fingertips weren’t pointed at the ceiling, god wouldn’t hear my prayer, or that if my hands were under my blanket, the blanket would muffle my voice to god.

    It is strange that I don’t remember when I stopped thinking I could be Christian. All I remember is being in sixth grade, and telling my electives group that I was an atheist, and watching scornfully as they scooted to the other end of the table with their spiteful cries of “Don’t talk to her! She’s going to hell!” (I haven’t yet unlearned my scorn of the religious. Don’t think I ever will.) Some time between second grade and sixth, I realized that I was an atheist. It was not earth-shattering, although it probably should have been. It happened so gradually and smoothly and naturally that I never noticed it happening.

    I do not choose what I believe to be true. Can someone voluntarily choose not to believe that water is two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen? I am not sorry. I would not want to believe something I feel to be false, even if I could convince myself. But in a way, I do envy the religious. They think they are going to heaven; they think they will still exist in some way after they die. They have never known the horror that is absolute absolute darkness, a darkness so complete you won’t even realize you’re in it. After all I’ve read of hell, I’d still rather suffer the torments of hell forever than not exist. Maybe I wouldn’t say that if I’d experienced hell. I don’t know. It is what I’d choose now, if the choice were presented to me now. The only thing I can imagine that might be worse than nonexistence is if my mind/soul/consciousness existed alone in black silence forever. If I were aware of myself, but alone forever, with no hope of any form of companionship, that might possibly be worse than death. They are both so horrible that I cannot tell which is worse.

    To grasp nonexistence is a cruel cruel trick the mind plays. I don’t know how it happens, but it comes in moments and waves of paralyzing fear, and it can happen in a second. One moment I’m perfectly fine, and the next, my mind has suddenly turned to death. Like a camera lens, it focuses on an empty void. The empty nature of that void becomes blindingly clear, for a moment I’m terribly afraid and terribly lonely and very very sad, I so regret that I will cease to exist one day, the world turns to ice, and my heart freezes. I’m utterly incapacitated in despair and fear.

    . . . I could not
    Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
    Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
    Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
    - T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

    It is not a conscious thought process. There are times during the day when I can think about death and nonexistence with a purely rational mind of pure reason, and I understand it consciously, but I am not afraid. And I think I’ve made peace with death. Then, the coming night quickly proves me wrong. There are times when I become aware of death on a subconscious, maybe even emotional? level. During these episodes, all I can do is tell myself, don’t think about it. When I was younger, I could say to myself, don’t worry. You’re only seven years old, you have many many years left. I’m no longer seven years old, and the years are flying by. Each year seemed so long when I was young!

    Remember I was very young then
    And a year was forever and a day
    So what use could fifty, sixty, seventy be?
    - Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Evita

    It was not much comfort. Somewhere else, I had read that smiling and watching someone smile makes people automatically feel better, so I took to running across the hall and smiling into the bathroom mirror. I still do it today. Other than that, all I can really do is try hard not to think about dying. Over the years, I’ve found that the fear strikes most commonly during winter and summer vacation, or when my mind is otherwise idle. The idle mind is prone to wandering; it drifts and settles to dwell upon the unresolved. As stressful as it is to have midterms and classes impending, to always have garbage that needs to be done right away, still it is preferable to that paralyzing fear. It is a fear that runs my life. Everything I do, everything I believe, everything I ever want to accomplish stems from being afraid for so many years. In my system of morals, life is near infinite happiness and utility, death is near infinite unhappiness. I will not even kill ants, not even when they bite me, for it is unimaginably horrible in my mind to take life away from them without cause. Their lives are short enough as it is.

    Today is Sunday. My last midterm was just last Wednesday. I was so relieved to have it all done! But on Friday, my newly-freed mind saw fit to terrorize me. I hadn’t been afraid all semester, but here we were, and I was just another frightened elementary child. They say that a second spent standing on hot coals feels like an hour, well, so indeed did that moment stretch on and on. What is time? At any given moment, I am merely the three-dimensional instantaneous projection of a four-dimensional being in time, and my projection onto the R3 manifold was frozen in horror. It was marginally less than pleasant.

    So now I know that after all these years, I’m still not free, and I must yet resort to wrenching my mind away from the pits of despair. I’d like to believe that when I am old and tired, I might not mind a long, ever-peaceful sleep, but now, I think that if I were to live a thousand or a billion years, still knowing the end will one day come, no matter how far away, would make me impossibly sad. Many times, I’ve heard people say, don’t worry. When you’re dead, you won’t feel it, and you won’t mind. What they don’t realize is that this is exactly what I mind most. I know I won’t care after the end, but I mind terribly in the here-and-now.

    In this short life, there is so much each person will never know, so much that exists that so many will never see, and after one dies, everything that one has not felt will never be known, ever. Before I die, I want to experience everything I possibly can.

    Peace, love, happiness,
    wobster109