Dr. Paul Monk on Mortality and Meaning

Originally published at https://www.nickfabbri.com/bloom/paulmonkmortalityandmeaning

Listen and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, PodBean, YouTube, and Google Podcasts

Full transcript below

In this podcast, Nick and Paul discuss:

• The commemoration of the dead through religious rituals, such as the Kaddish
• Representations of mortality, death, and dying as expressed in poetry and literature
• Why death exists in the world at all, as a function of life and natural selection
• The intersection of the biological process of death and religious rituals around and for death
• Concern for the dead in classical works such as The Iliad and Antigone
• Paul’s journey with metastatic cancer and contemporary literature on mortality
• Reviewing one’s priorities after confronting one’s mortality
• Reflections on death and dying through everyday encounters with our built environment, such as cemeteries
• Oliver Sacks and gratitude for the gift of life and consciousness

Dr Paul Monk is a poet, polymath and highly regarded Australian public intellectual. He has written an extraordinary range of books, from Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty (which resides in former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s library), to reflective essays on the riches of Western civilization in The West in a Nutshell, to a prescient 2005 treatise on the rise of China in Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China.

Follow Paul on Twitter

Dr. Paul Monk

Paul Monk on Mortality and Meaning

00:00 Paul: On March 24, 1996 which was Nissan 5, 5756 in the Jewish calendar, my father died. In the year that followed I said the prayer known as the mourner’s kaddish three times daily during the morning service, the afternoon service and the evening service in a synagogue in Washington and when I was away from home, in synagogues elsewhere. It was my duty to say it for reasons that will become clear in this book.

00:29 I was struck almost immediately by the poverty of my knowledge about the ritual that I was performing with such unexpected fidelity and it was not long before I understood that I would not succeed in insulating the rest of my existence from the impact of this obscure and arduous practice. The symbols were seeping into everything. A season of sorrow became a season of soul renovation for which I was not at all prepared.

00:56 Nick: You’re joining us on Bloom, a conversations podcast about anything and everything. That was Dr Paul Monk reading the first two paragraphs from the preface to Kaddish, a book by Leon Wieseltier published in 1996 about how he as a Jew came to terms with the death of his father and the wider and deeper impact that that had on his life. Paul, why should any of us observe the rituals of the kind that Wieseltier wrote about in Kaddish?

01:21 Paul: Well, the prior question might be what do we in fact do when it comes to rituals and commemoration of the dead? It’s worth asking that question because this tells us quite a bit about why we do it and we can build on that.

01:34 I mean, it differs from culture to culture. Leon Wieseltier’s experience as an observant Jew was of recovering the tradition that he had taken for granted, not thought very much about, and realising as he says that there was a poverty in his own understanding of why it was done at all and it came back to life for him — it sounds a little strange to say that, we’re talking about death — and it came back to life but it became clear to him that there was a reason for doing these things, that it was dignifying, it imparted meaning to his life, and it seeped into aspects of his life other than simply grieving for his father.

02:16 And I think if we looked at culture after culture over time and across space around the world, we would find similar things occurring, that when people on the occasion of the death of a parent or a beloved or a child do in fact take time out to immerse themselves in the rituals for the dead. It brings home to them the whole meaning of life, the significance of closeness to somebody, of caring about somebody, of losing somebody, of taking stock of their own mortality. That’s what’s at stake here and Wieseltier’s is a special very articulate case in point.

02:51 Nick: Well, in that context one of the most famous English poems is Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard which touches on a lot of the themes and contexts you’ve just spoken about.

03:01 Paul: Yeah, it does. It has been said as you put it that particular is one of the best known, most loved and most commonly recited or read in the English language and it’s very striking that should be so because, at least as I read it, it’s an uncomplicated poem. It’s not a highfalutin poem. It’s not a complex one. It’s written in simple rhyme and meter. It’s a relatively long poem but not by any means an epic poem and it simply is a reflection on the realities of death and burial and the commemoration of the dead and the unknown stories of the humble dead and it invites us to reflect on the course of life and the dignity of the dead and the nature of being human.

03:50 I mean, it’s significant given its popularity that if for example one reads just the opening four-line stanza:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

two things are probably going to occur. An unusually large number of people will say, “Oh, I’ve heard that,” which would not be true of a great many poems, and secondly the final line of that opening stanza brings the first person present, indicative, active as it were, into the story. I am implicated in this.

04:32 Nick: To me…

04:32 Paul: Right, to me. To darkness and to me, and darkness there clearly denotes this sense that this is a sombre matter. It’s night, it’s death. It’s significant. It’s not cheeriness in which one can just put those thoughts away and just get on with pleasant activities.

04:49 Nick: It’s enveloping, it’s night…

04:51 Paul: That’s the beginning of the poem. So, you enter into night and into the significance of death from the opening stanza and one of the stanzas in that poem that has always been most significant to me — some stanzas later — because of its literary illusions and its implications is

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.

A mute inglorious Milton is probably one of the most famous phrases from Gray’s poem and what it’s implying is there’s John Milton who wrote Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, but who knows how many people lived and died simply who had sublime thoughts but never became published poets? They were mute, they were inglorious, but they were human beings with sensibility. That’s a very moving reflection.

05:49 And when we stop and think about that, we’ll recognise that actually each of us knows people who we would say are sensitive, are intelligent, are literate or kind or good but they’re not famous. They’re not going to become famous, and they’ll die one day. They will be as it were mute inglorious Miltons, and if we think about it that way, we think but they would be worthy of commemoration. We would remember them with sadness and fondness. That’s the kind of thing that’s being conjured by this poem.

06:20 Nick: It’s almost the opposite sentiments to Horace’s poem Exegi Monumentum and its lines ‘I’ve built a monument more lasting than bronze’ referring to his poetry and art which outlives his physical being.

06:31 Paul: Yes. Yes, in fact that’s very well said because there is not the poet evoking the mute inglorious Miltons of the countryside and the churchyard, but a poet himself extolling his own work and saying, “I believe that what I’ve written is poetry of a higher kind which will long outlast me and outshine that of most other poets.”

06:53 Nick: And “Postera crescam laude”, I shall grow in later praise, as the motto of Melbourne University is.

06:58 Paul: Yes, well let’s not go there as both graduates of Melbourne University but there are problems with our universities these days in various ways. However, the university may be sick but it’s not yet dead. Let’s put it that way.

07:11 What it’s probably worth remarking in terms of context about Thomas Gray’s poem is that it was published in 1751. Gray himself died 20 years later but in those last 20 years of his life, he’s probably became famous to an extent that he’d never anticipated. He was quite a humble man. Didn’t publish a lot of poetry in his lifetime, but eight years after it was published James Wolfe, the British general who was leading the British campaign in Canada against the French in what was called the French-Indian war or the Seven Years War, was about to storm the French stronghold of Quebec and the night before that, he said to his officers — so the story goes — referring to Thomas Gray’s poem, he said, “I would rather have written those lines, that poem, than to take Quebec tomorrow,” which is a remarkable thing for a general to say, that he would rather have written a moving poem than be a successful general.

08:07 As it happens, the next day he did lead his forces. They did take Quebec and he himself got killed at the very point of victory which is remarkable when you juxtapose it with what he’d said the previous night. So, in a sense you might say the themes that we’re discussing here come together in that incident. There’s the poem published only a few years before. The general expresses admiration for the poem and almost the sense he’d prefer to be a poet of that calibre than a general winning a war and then he dies in a war. He becomes one of the dead.

08:45 Nick: Why is there death in the world at all? It obviously exists as a function of life which is a question one might ponder in and of itself, why we are something rather than nothing at all, and why do we memorialise those who die?

08:56 Paul: Yes, well that’s a series of questions of course. There is a fundamental question as to why there would be death and then there’s the almost metaphysical question as you put it, why is there anything? Why is there life?

09:17 The second of those questions is more or less intractable because we can’t explain why there’s life, except in explaining it in a scientific and biological sense how there is life, but that’s not quite the same thing. As any Aristotelian philosopher would say, it’s one thing to have a sufficient explanation or an efficient explanation for why something occurs, which is to say how it occurs, how it’s possible. To explain the final end of that, why in a purposive or in a teleological sense, that’s a difficult matter.

09:53 So, it has taken us most of the last 200 years, certainly 150 years since Darwin, to pin down how life works, how it evolved, how it functions genetically and biologically. Why it occurs at all, I would say we’re nowhere close to having explained it, least of all in terms of the final purpose and so there are religions that make up stories about how life began and where it’s all heading but any scientifically informed person will say, “Well, they’re in the nature of just those stories or fairy stories. There’s no basis for believing those except in so far as they might seem charming or engaging and give us some coherent ritual way to organise our thinking, but they’re not a substandard explanation.”

10:36 But if we go back to the initial question of why there is death, there’s a very good book by Nick Lane called Life Ascending. The subtitle of which is something like I think The Ten Greatest Inventions of Life. That is the ten remarkable things that have occurred in the emergence and evolution of life which have enabled it to take over the planet, which was previously as it were, sterile and to grow and develop and evolve into, as Darwin said, endless forms of the most beautiful, including ourselves.

11:04 And why is death part of that? Is it a blight, a mistake? No. If life is to change and evolve and grow and remain healthy and shuck off diseases and accidents, death is absolutely necessary. Otherwise, you stagnate, and you get lifeforms that don’t change or that sicken and don’t progress, or you get entrenched malformation or disease. So, death is an invention that comes in early in the emergence of complex lifeforms in order that the germ line, the central driver of life, can make progress…

11:42 Nick: Be perfected….

11:43 Paul: … while cells die off and poor mutations are shed, that early experiments are done and discarded, and what we need to be able to see is that from an unsentimental point of view, any given individual is not only a combination of cells which require our cells die off at regular intervals and that’s essential as well, but they also die because they are themselves simply a quick and superfluous experiment in the overall attempt — so to speak — of evolution, to come up with a better and fitter form of life, and that’s true of each of us.

12:26 So, we get a shot. We contribute our little bit to life continuing or growing or varying and then we die. Many of us reproduce in the process and so our offspring then continue that process, and I think as a writer and somebody who hasn’t had children, it’s worth observing — and this has been my personal belief for quite a few years now — as a human being, we can continue the biological process by having children and raising them to the best of our ability or we can, given that human beings are language animals and work in cultures that depend on information and its better use and development, we can contribute ideas and that is a contribution which transcends simply reproducing biologically because it can affect the quality and understanding of any number of other human beings, even though we don’t have children ourselves and as I aged and as I matured, I began to realise, well, I may or may not have children but I can contribute in my own way.

13:30 Nick: To the subsequent generations of the germ line…

13:32 Paul: Yes, to my contemporaries and to who knows how many others. So, if you go back to your quote about Horace, Horace had this intuition that the poetry he’d written 2000 years ago would long outlive him, and indeed it has, to an extent to which I think he even would be astonished by it.

13:46 So, I mentioned — just to backtrack slightly — Nick Lane’s explanation, it’s a scientific explanation, of how death began and what it’s function is and why it’s necessary and he spells this out rather beautifully in a few lines when he says once somatic cells as bodily cells have accepted their subsidiary role — that is, that they are bit part players in complex life forms — the timing of their death becomes subservient to the needs of the germ line. That is what Richard Dawkins calls the selfish genes, the real drivers of life. Only death, says Nick Lane, makes multi-cellular life possible and of course without death, there could be no evolution. Without differential survival, natural selection comes to nothing. If creatures can’t die, nothing is being selected.

14:38 So, if you look at life in the natural world, all this makes evident sense. Yet when we contemplate it in ourselves or among those we love, we’ll cross human societies. When we see people die and those we love die, we become troubled and puzzled by it as if it was somehow unnatural. It isn’t, of course. It is perfectly natural, but it tells us something about ourselves as human beings, as conscious beings, that we see this as a puzzle.

15:04 Nick: And we’re tempted to lay on myths and rationalisations around that through religion and so on as well, right?

15:08 Paul: Yes, and it’s striking that we don’t automatically as a, dare I say it, an advanced life form understand intuitively that this is completely natural. I think there’s part of us that does in any given culture, but what we know right across historic time and well before that is that human beings find the death of others, the death of those in their tribe or their family, their loved ones, sufficiently troubling that they have to invent rituals to deal with it and dignify it, and that’s the central focus of poetry and of religion and of ritual and a good deal of philosophy.

15:44 Nick: So, how do we explain the biological process of death and religious rituals around and for death?

15:51 Paul: Well, I think Nick Lane fairly adequately explains the biological nature of death. The question is why as human beings we add onto that, and Thomas Laqueur wrote a remarkable book published a couple of years ago called The Work of the Dead. It’s a mighty tome, it’s a 700-page book. It reflects on this question of why we do rituals, why we dignify corpses with commemoration and rituals, rather than just throwing them on the scrapheap so to speak.

16:19 And he begins with a story about Diogenes the Cynic in the fourth century BC in Athens who famously said, “As far as I’m concerned when I die you can throw my corpse over the wall for the dogs. I’m not going to be hanging around worrying about it,” and as Laqueur says from a purely objective point of view, Diogenes was correct. It’s not going to matter to the dead person what happens to their body because they won’t be aware of that, but then he says the thing is, when we dignify the dead, we don’t do it, so the dead won’t be offended. We do it because the living are concerned, and his title The Work of the Dead is about the role in which respect for corpses and the commemoration of the dead and the rituals we have around that, as Leon Wieseltier found in the case of Kaddish, tell us a lot about how we conduct ourselves in the world, what the passage through life is about, how we would like to be regarded and therefore we have great hesitation regarding corpses as garbage. We think, “No, a person has passed through and this is their remains and that’s significant,” and so we approach it with dignity.

17:30 On the other hand, what we know — and this has been true also throughout history — is that there are circumstances in which in fact corpses are violated or exposed or thrown to the dogs, and it’s worth asking, “So, that’s the flip side of our dignified rituals. Why does that happen?”

17:45 Nick: You think about Hector being dragged around the walls of Troy in The Iliad and so on.

17:50 Paul: Indeed. Indeed, and it’s interesting you evoke to Iliad because funeral rites in the Iliad are of great significance and the funeral of Patroclus and the funeral of Achilles himself when he is eventually killed and of Hector, the recovery of his body, that Priam comes out and he says, “Oh, my son is dead. I want his body back. I want to give him a burial.” This is exactly what we’re talking about and this is long before Christianity.

18:15 Nick: We’ve just been talking about Homer and The Iliad and how the human respect for the dead is a central concern, but there is another great play called Antigone by Sophocles in which respect for the dead is a central concern as well.

18:27 Paul: Yes, absolutely it is. Antigone is one of the all-time great Greek tragedies still performed in the modern world and much reflected on by philosophers, for example by Hegel. Why? Because it brings out powerfully the nature of what it means to be human and we respect the dead, and for those who are unfamiliar with the play, the core of it is that there are a number of young men in Thebes who rebel against the government. They’re defeated. They’re killed and the ruling of the government is that the bodies will be exposed outside the walls. One thinks of Diogenes himself saying, “Well, once I’m dead, you can throw my body outside the walls if you want. I don’t care.”

19:11 Well, who cared? The government cared because it deliberately wanted to expose these bodies by way of indicating these people are traitors, they’re outside the community, they’ve forfeited the respect we would normally apply to the dead, but Antigone is the sister of one of these men and she insists that it is her moral duty to give him a decent burial. She is told by the government, “You must not do that,” and she says, “On the contrary, I must. The law of the city says don’t, but natural law says I must and therefore I will.”

19:41 She does and she is then condemned to death for having violated the law of the city and she goes to her death. She is buried alive for having done that and the question that’s at stake here is what is the source of our higher duty and how is this brought to the fore precisely by how we treat the dead, and it’s an extraordinary play. That’s Sophocles, one of the greatest of the traditions, the fifth century BC.

20:12 And that theme, that reflection resonates all the way through certainly our western tradition, and it was in the modern world — of course, once we had broadly speaking agreed that okay, we’ve got religion and we’ve got rituals and we have traditions and we have poetry, but we now understand that as creatures we are evolved since Darwin. We did evolve biologically, and we do die. We are really mortal, and we don’t die because of original sin. We didn’t fall into death. Death is part of the scheme of things and it’s an important part as Nick Lane had reminded us in the scheme of things. What therefore are we to make of mortality? What is the meaning of this?

20:56 And the philosopher of hermeneutics, Hans-Georg Gadamer, in a book called Reason in the Age of Science remarked the burial of the dead is perhaps the fundamental phenomenon of becoming human. Burial does not refer to a rapid hiding of the dead as if we’re clearing away the shocking impression made by one suddenly stuck fast in a leaden and lasting sleep. On the contrary, by remarkable expenditure of human labour and sacrifice, there is sought an abiding with the dead. In fact, a holding fast of the dead among the living. We have to regard this in its most elementary significance. It is not a religious affair or a transposition of religion into secular customs, wars and so on. Rather it is a matter of the fundamental constitution of human being from which derives the specific sense of human practice. We are dealing here with a conduct of life that has spiralled out of the order of nature.

21:54 So, Claude Levi Strauss, the anthropologist, has suggested that the incest taboo was this boundary marker, the cognitive break between animal life and human conscious life. Gadamer is suggesting well, in fact, it could be funeral rites and the dignified treatment of the dead which is that boundary marker.

22:12 And as he says, we’re not dealing here with religion and myth, although that whole field is immersed in them. Rather we’re in the role of anthropology, archaeology, human culture evolution. In other words, we’re implicated in the modern scientific reconstruction of our humanity. So, the conversation you and I are having here is embedded in a deep enquiry which draws on our human sciences and our natural sciences in terms of dating and so on as to how did we come about such that we respect the dead, such that we’re conscious of significance of dying and of the personal dignity and meaning implicit in it?

22:50 And we now know that goes a long way back. It doesn’t begin in the Garden of Eden. It begins tens and tens of thousands of years ago with our human ancestors and we don’t know exactly when it begins. We do know that Neanderthals appear to have been doing some of this at least 40,000 years ago, maybe longer. Given that our species have been around now for up to 300,000 years, there’s a reasonable bet that some form or other of funerary practices of this kind probably go back hundreds of thousands of years but we have very little evidence for that, but that’s where we’re pressing the enquiry to figure out, well, this is us. This is the kind of thing that sets us apart, we think. Where did it begin? Why do we do it?

23:30 Nick: But it may not set us apart as humans because famously elephants revisit the bones of the dead and dolphins have been observed performing grieving rituals around their deceased brethren. Indeed, it seems to go beyond the human to a ritual exhibited by more advanced life forms.

23:44 Paul: Well, of course what we do is we shift the enquiry slightly if we say advanced life form. So, if it was only human beings, we would say well it’s precisely because we are advanced — that is, conscious and reflective — that we do these things.

24:00 If it turns out that other mammals — I mean, dolphins and elephants for example are both varieties of mammal — and we think that mammals perhaps are more emotional, perhaps more intelligent creatures than reptiles or crustaceans or insects or birds. Maybe it’s something that emerges through the more broad mammalian germ line.

24:22 What we can say is that even though elephants might revisit the bones of the dead or there might be what appear to be elephant graveyards, so far as we’re aware, they don’t conduct what we would recognise as rituals or actual burials. In fact, in important respects they probably couldn’t do that, given their physiognomy, but there may be a family resemblance, as Wittgenstein would say, between some of the things that they do or gesture at and what we have done more and more elaborately in the course of history.

24:56 What we’re now at though is once we become scientific and self-conscious and what we like to think of as disillusioned, we have to ask ourselves, “If we’re just practical, if we’re scientific, if we have enormous respect for the facts, we’re not superstitious, we’re not particularly religious, why do we do these things?” It becomes an anthropological question, and not just a religious tradition, and this brings us again back to Wieseltier and Kaddish because he was a modern secular man who happened to be Jewish. Then his father dies, and he goes through this ritual because his father has died but in going through the ritual, he stops and thinks, “This is a remarkable ritual and I had become oblivious to it.” It had become in an important sense dead to me.

25:40 Nick: Which required a soul renovation…

25:40 Paul: As he calls it, a soul renovation. I’m rethinking and re-experiencing what it means to commemorate the dead and for my father to have died and who I am in the world and that I am mortal.

25:52 Nick: Which he understands through the Jewish tradition…

25:55 Paul: He in that instance, yes, understands it through the Jewish tradition. It would be a mistake, or we might say a cultural prejudice, to assert or assume that it was uniquely dignified. He happened to be Jewish, and he rediscovers that tradition, but you could be a Buddhist, you could be a Hindu, you could be a Chinese, you could be a Muslim and you could have the same experience, but he is testifying to how profoundly it affected him doing that.

26:20 And what I think I’m saying in this conversation is it’s worth our while as human beings to put ourselves through that kind of exercise and if we can do it at one I would say higher level even than that of Wieseltier, so instead of just putting ourselves back into whatever tradition happens to be ours or available to us, we say a bit more broadly speaking, philosophically speaking across these different traditions, “What is it that’s going on?”

26:44 And that’s like instead of just speaking English, to say English is one of thousands of languages. What is language? What is going on that we use language? That’s what we’re driving out here with regard to death and rituals.

26:58 So, when I mention becoming philosophical and rising above the immediately available traditions, one of the most significant philosophers of the 20th century — a controversial one because of his flirtation with and indeed commitment to Nazism — Martin Heidegger — but he is in some ways best known for a book published in 1927 called Being and Time, and it was his attempt to situate human thinking phenomenologically within a natural world and to remove its presuppositions from metaphysics and dualism, and to say we are creatures in the world, but we’re conscious creatures in the world, and he wrote of human being in a world, of conscious being in the world, of what he called dasein, the vertiginous awareness that can make us dizzy of existing in a time bound order and of our thrown-ness towards death and ineluctable demise.

27:51 As far as we’re aware, animals don’t have consciousness that they’re going to die. They just live and die. Human beings on the other hand tend to have that consciousness, but Heidegger then says that the peculiar thing about human beings is that that consciousness is more or less a given but we in so many cases, perhaps the majority of cases, try and push it away. We try not to think about that. We think it’s morbid to think about that. We don’t know what to make of that and so we engage in all sorts of frivolities and distractions and activities or frenetic activities in order precisely not to think about death and then one day we die, or we see people that we love die and we have to confront it.

28:31 What do we then do? And he says well we do various things, but we could do better if we think more about this and make it constitutive of how we in fact live in our thrown-ness towards death, and to my way of thinking that’s a profound contribution to our philosophical thought.

28:48 Nick: So, if our religious traditions aren’t adequate to our new understanding of death and dying, precisely how should we be thinking about that one big subject of mortality?

28:57 Paul: Yes. I mean, it is as you put it in a sense, one subject and a very big subject and an interactive one because it’s not going away. It’s not an illusion. It is a ground reality, and one point of entry into this is that some years ago now the American medical doctor and science writer about the life of being a doctor and about medicine and society, Atul Gawande, wrote a book called Being Mortal that when he went through medical school, he and his peers learned about how to save lives. They learned about the nature of life and illness and how to fend off illness and death, but he said we didn’t study death and dying because that was simply the negation of what we were there to learn about, so we were led to believe.

29:51 But he said the more I have dealt with the living and the inevitability of death and the difficulties in dying, the more I thought we’ve got to better than this. We’ve got to think harder about the conditions under which dying takes place and how to handle it better and how to live towards mortality with dignity. This is a doctor’s practical reflection on the kinds of profound questions that Heidegger had been pondering almost 100 years earlier.

30:20 Nick: Yep, and you yourself as we discussed in another podcast had an experience with metastatic cancer. Was Gawande’s book something that provided context and inspiration for that particular journey?

30:31 Paul: Yeah, it was. I mean, I read that book. I read another one by a fellow called Sherwin Nuland who as I recall is another American medical practitioner essentially. His book is called How to Die, Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter, and they were certainly part of my reading and part of effort to think through okay, how do I take responsibility for what could be my imminent mortality and along the way reflect better about what will in the end, one way or another, be my mortality, whether or not it’s the cancer that kills me.

31:06 But I have to say that there were more important readings I did than those books by the medical guys because, as Heidegger would have certainly said, death is about a lot more than biological demise, about the failure of our bodies. That’s the most obvious aspect of it and the treatment of bodies as corpses is the obvious part of rituals, but the key thing to being human is the personality that animates a body and it’s the separation of that personality, the disappearance of that personality, that makes a body a corpse.

31:41 Nick: Alas Poor Yorick…

31:43 Paul: Alas Poor Yorick. It’s such an evocative passage from Shakespeare. For those of our listeners unfamiliar with it, one simply has to pick it up. This is in a crucial scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet where Hamlet is in a graveyard and he notices — and he’s got his friend Horatio with him — he notices that a grave has been dug and he has no idea who it’s been dug for. He’s just rather curious about the process of digging the grave and the gravedigger is digging a hole and throwing up old skulls and bones to vacate it for a new body.

32:23 What Hamlet doesn’t know — and he discovers only at the end of that scene — is that the body that’s about to be buried there is Ophelia, his girlfriend who has just committed suicide. He doesn’t know this has happened and he doesn’t know that his own words to her actually triggered her suicide. The dramatic irony is profound, but when the grave digger throws up a particular skull and Hamlet sort of catches it and he says, “So, any idea who this was?”

32:49 Nick: Stares death in the face…

32:49 Paul: Yes. I mean, it’s absolutely classic. It’s been painted and all sorts of things and the grave digger says, “Oh, that skull there, young master, that belonged to Yorick who used to be the court jester,” and Hamlet, you can almost the intake of breath because he remembers Yorick and he had no idea this was his grave or his skull and he says, “Alas poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio. He was a man of most excellent jest.”

33:18 Nick: A thousand times…

33:19 Paul: That’s right. A thousand times he bore me on his back and set the table on a roar. It’s a wonderful passage and that as much as almost any passage in literature is having us through Hamlet’s eyes confront mortality.

33:35 Nick: And the base materialism that we’re all reduced to when Hamlet says that Caesar, dead and turned to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away.

33:42 Paul: Yes, the same fate has befallen Alexander and Caesar and that brings us almost back to Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, that people are buried, and that death takes us all and there’s a kind of democracy of death because once you’re dead, all your glories and pretensions, they’re gone.

34:01 Horace might respond, “Sure, with my body but my poetry, that endures,” but to come back to this question therefore of reading, if anything that little digression throws up in a variant the point I was going to make which is I read these medical things about biological death, but we’ve just discovered right there that Hamlet’s soliloquy or his remarks in Shakespeare’s play brings these things to the fore in a way that a more medical and biological reflection actually doesn’t do, and there were two books that I did read while I was ill that did that for me. One was Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time which culminates right at the end with a reflection on dying and what it means to be alive, to be conscious and to try and finish one’s work and one’s writing, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward which is explicitly — and I read it for precisely this reason of course — about a person who is in a hospital in the old Soviet Union because he has melanoma. He has the same disease I had and he’s wrestling with, “Well, what do I make of this? What do I do with my time? When I die, if I die, what do I think about that?”

35:11 So, these made a much more vivid impression and the characters come to life in the process of thinking about death much more vividly than in the medical pages, and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is famously immensely long and I’d never read it before the cancer metastasised. When I did, I had to spend long periods resting. I was sleeping 12 hours a day and I thought, “Why don’t I finally read Proust?” First of all, while there’s still time and secondly, because I’ve got time, because I can’t work properly.

35:46 There was well over 4,000 pages in the novel. If people are unfamiliar with it, 4,000 pages. I mean, who would read that? The truth is most people don’t but trust me, it’s well worth doing. It’s a remarkable piece of writing and towards the very end of the final volume, which is actually called Time Regained, Proust’s narrator who is an alter-ego — he is actually called Marcel, so Marcel Proust wrote a novel with a narrator called Marcel — reflects precisely on dying and he says to himself:

“The idea of death took up permanent residence within me in the way that love sometimes does. Not that I love death, I abhorred it, but after a preliminary stage in which no doubt I thought about it from time to time, as one does about a women with whom one is not yet in love, it’s image adhered now to most profound layer of my mind so completely that I could not give up my attention to anything without that thing first traversing the idea of death, and even if no object occupied my attention and I remained in a state of complete repose, the idea of death still kept me company as faithfully as the idea of myself.

And on that day on which I had become a half dead man, I do not think it was the accidents characterising this condition — my inability to walk downstairs, to remember a name, to get up from a chair — that had even by an unconscious train of thought given rise to this idea of death, this conviction that I was already almost dead. It seems to me rather that the idea had come simultaneously with the symptoms, that inevitably the mind, great mirror that it is, reflected a new reality. Yet still I did not see how from my present ailments one could pass without warning of what was to come to total death. Then, however I thought of other people, of the countless people who die every day without the gap between their illness and their death seeming to us extraordinary.”

37:46 This is literary. This is in the same kind of realm as Hamlet’s reflections and that enriched my understanding of the condition which I was in. Proust famously as he wrote this all but interminable novel was seriously ill. He was confined largely to his bed in what they say was a cork-lined bedroom to give him privacy, to give him quiet, to give him rest and he wrote and mostly wrote at night, and I did a lot of writing in those years of illness and a lot of reading and that helped me to form my understanding of what was going on and what it meant to me, but having had that thought, Proust reflected that he would render the fact of his mortality meaningful by finishing if he could a book that he was writing which is in fact the book one is reading, even though he acknowledged that eternal duration is promised no more to men’s works than to men which of course links back again to Horace thinking that in fact maybe he has transcended that with works that will last longer than the pyramids.

38:52 Now, Proust did finish his work of course and so far, 100 years after his death at the age of 50, it has survived and been acclaimed, but this isn’t an outcome anyone can guarantee and isn’t available at all to most mortals. They won’t do things that will outlast them.

39:07 In Cancer Ward, the response of Vadim, the guy with the melanoma, is comparable to that of Marcel and thus Proust, but less ambitious. He simply decides that he’s not going to waste what time is available to him by engaging in frivolous distractions. It’s almost as if he is as read his Heidegger, but he hasn’t. It’s just that Solzhenitsyn, the author, is a serious and philosophical person as Heidegger was and he has Vadim reflect that — he says,

“The falsest line of reasoning would be to treat what he was losing — that is, his life, his freedom — as a premise. How happy he’d have been, how far he’d have got, what he’d have attained if only he lived longer.

The right view was the accept the statistics which stated that some people are bound to die young. So, dying young, a man stays young forever in people’s memory. If he burns brightly before he dies, his light shines for all time. In his musings during the past few weeks, Vadim had discovered an important and at first glance paradoxical point. A man of talent can understand and accept death more easily than a man with none, yet the former has more to lose. A man of no talent craves long life, yet Epicurus had once observed that a fool if offered eternity would not know what to do with that.”

40:38 I love that paragraph and much else in Cancer Ward because I was in precisely that situation even with precisely that disease and had to think, “What do I do with my time which may be running out and is in any case diminished by my illness?”

40:52 Nick: So, how did your readings reshape your approach to your own mortality, and I guess reconfigure your priorities during your illness and afterwards as well?

41:00 Paul: The simplest way to put that is that I had been doing more and more writing in the years before the metastases because I’d become increasingly convinced that as we discussed in a previous podcast, I was and wanted to be a writer and a poet, rather than a consultant or a political activist or a government official or whatever.

41:28 I decided — when I learned that I had the metastasis, I had embarked on writing a long novel which was a great psychodynamic effort to rethink who I was in any case and that novel is called Darkness Over Love. As it happened by coincidence you might say, I had been in the Mediterranean on fieldwork for that novel. I had been in Spain and the Canary Islands before coming back and having a scan which showed that I had the metastases, and yet in the Mediterranean, I had drafted an epilogue to that story in which the fictional character comes back to his place at the ends of the earth and discovers that he has metastatic cancer. So, I’d written that not realising I had metastatic cancer and then came back and discovered that I did. That was quite uncanny.

42:19 Nick: Disturbing, even…

42:20 Paul: Yeah, and I then decided as my highest order priority, look, now that it’s metastasised, I might go down within a year or two so I’m going to get a form of this story finished and published if it’s the last thing I do, literally the last thing I do.

42:37 So, I did publish an unfinished version of that in 2014 and then I realised first of all, I’m not yet dying and there’s a whole lot of other things I’d like to set down in writing, so I wrote a string of books, Credo and Twelve poems in 2015, Opinions and Reflections in 2016, The Secret Gospel According to Mark in 2017, Dictators and Dangerous Ideas in 2018. So, a string of books and the thought that maybe I was about to die was ever present, but it kept being postponed because in fact I wasn’t getting critically ill.

43:08 But what might be fun to share in a way but meaningful to share at this juncture is a couple of paragraphs from the epilogue to Darkness Over Love where Fenimore, the fictional character — my alter ego if you will — in fact comes back from his travels and discovers that he’s got metastatic cancer and he falls to then reflecting on what to do and his decision, similar to Proust’s, is if I do nothing else what I want to do is finish my work and he was writing. He had been writing a long sort of philosophical private book for Margarita, his beloved, and so he decides what I will do is I will finish to the best of my ability and then I’m done. I’m going to die.

44:07 So, the epilogue is that process of him thinking that through and acting that out, but it begins with him experiencing the process of illness. When he returns, he drops his bags in his mansion at the ends of the earth which is this walled estate with an immense library — it’s a dream fulfilled on my part — and then he collapses and that paragraph reads:

‘I do remember — or my brain has created this ‘memory’ to lend colour and coherence to its confusion — standing under the great, deep blue ceiling, staring up at Atlas the Titan, Pleione and their children, as if seeking to discern something from my chosen stars; like a magus in Ur of the Chaldees, before there was a science of the heavens. But the frescoed fable of the changing Earth began to move around, faster and faster, until I became dizzy. The Pleiades, at centre frame, then began to spin away from me like the revolving Earth, as if fleeing Orion the Hunter in the old astrological fable. I fell, at last, in my own Hall; like an exhausted or defeated hunter, among the Ice Age beasts and the ancient ochre signs of the artistic Aurignacians that surrounded me.’

45:17 And the balance of the epilogue is then about him being ill for a couple of weeks, discovering he’s got this terminal cancer — there’s really no way he’s going to survive it — finishing the last words to his notebooks and then sending them off so that they’ll reach a little circle of his intimates and then he signs off addressing Margarita, his beloved, whom his whole work of his was addressed:

‘All these levels of darkness I had set out to fathom when we met, believing still in light, the giving off of free oxygen and the exchange of information. You wanted to believe that music was the answer to all darkness, but your disillusionment with Abreu cast a shadow over your hope. Orchestration and choral polyphony would be the human equivalent to the terraforming work of the prokaryotes. Yes? Dance and song, properly understood, would be the healing therapies for the species. Ah, my songbird of paradise, if I could have one wish, it would be to hear again your singing voice, like that of Nefesh in the high halls of Memphis, in the days of our youth and our love. Now, however, I must embark alone upon Aletheia and go freely, at last, where Nun shall find me.’

46:36 Nick: That’s an incredible body of work to have written while ill and to have seen it all into print, but you obviously recovered and once you had, did you find that your priorities in life had permanently shifted?

46:47 Paul: I would say that it induced, once I realised that I was actually not going to die imminently, a total commitment to serious writing, above all poetry and to love and meaning and others. To answer your question, no I wasn’t about to revert. In fact, I remember very specifically lying in a hot bath one evening thinking about, “Alright, if I’m not going to die sometime soon — if I’m in complete remission as they tell me, I’ve got to earn a living again. What do I want to do? What am I going to do?” and it was very clear to me emotionally/intuitively, I don’t want to just go back to earning a living in terms of the business and this is crucial in terms of the existential parameters we’re talking about. What did I want to do? I passionately wanted to write.

47:32 So, I thought, “Okay, good. That’s fine but if I’m going to do that, it has to earn a living for me. So, what can I write that will both be authentic and creative and earn me a living?” and I set about thinking that through and I’ve been engaged since then — this is the last three years — in a number of projects that have the intention of being both highly creative and raising my profile and therefore my earning capabilities to a whole new level.

48:00 One of those projects is a book of poetry called Lyrical Epigrams, which we’ve excerpted from in a couple of our interviews. Another is a major TV drama about the feigning of the Emirate of Cordoba in the eighth century and as I worked on these, there’s been a slow revitalisation and I have now in fact got to the point now where I can enjoy life more than I’ve been able to do for quite a few years, but that enjoyment is strongly geared to these existential questions.

48:29 Nick: That reveals what you’ve been doing in life since your recovery but talk to us a bit more about those reflections on death which you’ve continued throughout.

48:36 Paul: Yes. I think there’s a couple of aspects to that. One is that not only because I’d been through what in a sense was an diffuse near-death experience, but because I’m now 64 — I’m not a young man and I’ll never be young again — I’m more aware than before that however well the next few years may go, my days are numbered in an important sense, an irreducible sense.

49:07 And so I think about that and I use it to focus my attention on my priorities, but one of the other things I do on a regular basis is I walk. I go for a walk every day and because of where I live, there’s a large cemetery, the Melbourne Central Cemetery only a couple of hundred yards away, and I’ll often walk through there because it’s a great stimulus to thinking about the very things you and I have just been discussing, and one of the things that strikes me again and again when I walk through the cemetery is that there are endless examples, and they leap at you from all sides. You don’t just sort of go hunting them down in obscure corners of the graveyard — of gravestones that go back to the period between the 1850s when the cemetery was more or less set up to at least the 1950s — where you find stone after stone commemorating children dying in infancy, children dying in early childhood, young adults dying in their twenties, their thirties, their forties, to an extent that you simply don’t see in the more recent gravestones. It’s stark demographic evidence that life expectancy was much lower, even here in Australia, in a free and prosperous and relatively healthy environment until the last half century.

50:17 And that’s really thought provoking and it’s very poignant because to give a couple of examples — here’s for example a more or less random gravestone which is haunting because we don’t know who erected it and it’s obviously long neglected and you can just make out the writing which reads “sacred to the memory of Donald Ross who departed this life on March the 10th 1857, aged six months.”

50:48 We’ve been talking about why do we treat bodies with respect, why do we give them burial rights. This was a six-month-old child. The name Donald Ross is given to an infant who never got going really and you think, “What’s the story there? Who were the parents? What was the little ceremony around the erection of the gravestone, the burial of that little infant?” We don’t know. It might be possible to find out but…

51:13 Nick: Well, to go back to Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood, some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, with their potentiality unmanifested.

51:27 Paul: Well, this is an extreme case of unrealised potentiality because this is not some intelligent, sensitive, 30/40/50-year-old who died unrenowned. It’s a six-month-old baby who never really got a chance at life and would never have even been in all senses of the word conscious that it was alive.

51:46 There’s another one — that’s Donald Ross, a completely separate gravestone and there’s no reason to believe that they’re connected by family — is William Ross and it lists five sons of his who died. So, the gravestone reads, “In memory of my dear husband, William Ross, who died at 45 in 1907,” and then it adds poignantly, “And of our sons,” and listen to this. William, Thomas and Nicholas — three sons — who died in infancy. We’re not told exactly when, and then Private Jerome Ross died Pozieres, France, 3 July 1916, aged 20, and Redmond Ross, 16th Battalion AIF, killed in action, St Quentin, France 23 August 1918, aged 25. That’s an incredible story. We don’t know what eventually became of the woman who dedicated this grave to her husband. What we know is that she lost him when he was 45. They had already lost three sons in infancy and then whilst she was still alive, both her remaining sons — at least, unless they had others as well — died at the ages of 20 and 25 in the first world war. That’s a staggering story and that’s one simple gravestone at random.

53:03 Or there’s one even more poignant in its own way. John Elizabeth Gillies, in memory of their children. It says, “John, died 19 April 1957, aged one year. William, died 23 September 1857 — the same year — aged four years. Adam, died 1 November 1852 — so five years earlier — aged 2 years and 5 months.” So, three children dead in infancy and it’s bare. It’s stark. These are the basic facts. There’s no narrative. There’s no exclamation, “Alas, poor children, I knew them, and I loved them tenderly.” Just the names and the dates and you think wow, imagine living through that.

53:41 Nick: And carrying on with life after such an immense loss…

53:43 Paul: Yes. You’ve lost three sons in infancy. You’ve lost your husband who was only 45. You have two sons who appear perfectly healthy, then they’re killed in the first world war at the ages of 20 and 25. How do you deal with that?

53:57 Nick: I suppose death was far more a part of every day life for that generation.

54:01 Paul: Crushingly so and that as we said is in a society, a settlement, in Victoria in Australia that by world standards is prosperous. In those years, Australia was one of the most prosperous per capita countries in the world. It’s free. It’s well governed. Compared with most countries, it’s relatively healthy and still this is happening, and then as I said there’s the Gillies who lose three sons within five years, all in infancy or who were very young, and then there’s one in memory it says of Eleanor, beloved wife of Robert Richardson, died 20 April 1886, age 53, and their infant children, Jane, born 31 January 1850, died 11 September 1852, so 2.5 years old. Elizabeth, born 11 August 1851, died 7 September 1852, so around the same time as her sister Jane but slightly younger. Jane Elizabeth, named for the other two, born 19 March 1854 died 10 April 1856, and Sarah, born 24 September 1865, almost a decade later, died 12 May 1866, less than a year old, and finally Robert Richardson died East Melbourne 23 May 1893, aged 69, having lived through all of that.

55:25 The graveyard is full of that and a way to wrap around what we are reflecting on is this is a microcosm of the human condition. All around the world right across history, that has been going on.

55:35 Nick: Billions and billions of cases…

55:37 Paul: Endless cases. We talk about mute inglorious Miltons. Well, not maybe Miltons but certainly mute and inglorious and in all too many cases died so young that they never got to live flourishing lives.

55:54 You call your podcast series Bloom, and you like to interview people who have lived interesting and flourishing lives. I’ve been fortunate. In a lot of ways, I’ve done exactly that, despite the cancer, but what we see in the graveyard, what I ponder every time I walk through it is so many people have not had that opportunity.

56:10 Nick: I suppose it’s what we have to be so grateful for, the fact that we’ve lived relatively long and flourishing and peaceful lives historically. A lot of these sentiments are captured by Oliver Sacks, a wonderful doctor and writer who many listeners would be familiar with. In facing his own death from metastatic cancer, he wrote a beautiful book called Gratitude of which there are two excerpts I’d like to read and conclude the interview on today.

56:32 The first is, “I cannot pretend I am without fear. My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. I have read and travelled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, a special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal on this beautiful planet and that in itself has been enormous privilege and adventure.”

57:01 And the second one is, writing at around the age of 80, thinking back on what he could have done differently and whether he might have got more out of life which is something that plagues us all. He wrote, “At nearly 80 with a scattering of medical and surgical problems, none disabling, I feel glad to be alive. ‘I’m glad I’m not dead!’ sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect. I am grateful that I have experienced many things, some wonderful, some horrible, and that I’ve been able to write a dozen books, to receive innumerable letters from friends, colleagues and readers, and to enjoy what Nathaniel Hawthorn called an intercourse with the world. I am sorry I have wasted and still waste so much time. I am sorry to be as agonisingly shy at 80 as I was at 20. I am sorry that I speak no languages but my mother tongue and that I have not travelled or experienced other cultures as widely as I should have done.”

57:47 Paul: Look, I can absolutely relate to all of that. I mean, all of that. I really mean that, with the possible exception that I’m not perhaps as shy as he was and I don’t know because I haven’t checked his record but when he says he feels that he could have travelled more widely, I have managed to travel fairly widely, and I really cherish the exposure it’s given me to the variety of humanity.

58:19 But I’m only 64. He was writing that when he was 80. If I live until I’m 80 or so, that’s 16 years, given where I’ve managed to get so far and that I’ve survived the cancer, it’s absolutely inspiring to think of what I might be able to accomplish in 16 more years, and if anything there’s probably a note that could be worth concluding on and that is that as I have said in a previous podcast, more than one, my great soulmate, my muse, my partner in life is Claudia, and a couple of years ago we had been travelling in Spain and Switzerland and we were about to part company because she lives and works in Caracas and I in Melbourne, and she said to me in the departure lounge, “I intend to live until I’m 92 and I want you around for the duration,” and I said, “Well, that’s a very sweet thing to say but if I do that, I’ll be 104 and I’m really not sure you’d want me around.”

59:23 And what that says is two things or three things I suppose. One is that she and I are both conscious of ageing and mortality but she’s very full of vitality and committed to life, wants to live a long life and wants my company. That’s a beautiful thing to hear.

59:38 Secondly, that nevertheless it’s an ineluctable process. We do age and we cannot forever fend it off and we will end up parting. One of us will die before the other and barring some terrible accident, I’ll go first because I’m 12 years older than her and I’ve been ill and she’s full of fitness and vitality.

59:57 But the third thing and the highlight of it is that we are doing this, we’re sharing our lives with great freedom. We’re travelling. We’re seeing things together. We’re talking about everything. We care about each other. That’s a great way to live and that’s been enhanced by the experience of illness and reflecting on death.

01:00:15 Nick: And to link it back to the original comment we made at the start of the interview about how strange existence is in itself, that we should be anything at all and not nothing, we should be so grateful to have been alive at all and to have experienced life on this beautiful planet.

01:00:28 Paul: Yeah. I mean, stones can be sublime to contemplate but I wouldn’t swap places for them for any money.

01:00:36 Nick: Thank you very much for your time, Paul. It’s been wonderful.

01:00:38 Paul: Thank you.