I don’t want to go to bed. I want the white of my eyes to be visible forever. And take in all that’s left of daylight and darkness. And absorb it through never ending sights to make me live. I don’t want to sleep. I want to feel the wake in the motions of my arms and the most extreme opposite of slitting my wrists in a bathtub. There is not enough time in my life for me to lay down and wait for a different day. I want to be conscious every second of it – and don’t make me think I don’t need it. I need to feel alive and I need to be assured there’s no signs of death waiting for me. I want my eyes to be everywhere looking for everything – but not for you, my blinding whore. I want them to see you taking off your robe and going for a shower. I want my eyes to be the fly on the wall of a government crisis meeting. My eyes to be diaries of depressed teenagers and the corollaries to blind elderlies in love. I want to see it all, so much that I feel two of them isn’t enough. The sole comfort I find in bed is to remind myself that I still see something when I sleep. I get to look inward and contemplate the greatest story that’s ever lived which is also the greatest story never been told. It’s a lukewarm paradox. Two eyes see the same thing, whereas my dream and the real only require a single seeing frame.
There is a lot in philosophy that’s concerned with living up to the moment of dying. And for good cause, we are concerned with the moment of dying: How and when, and what to do if the curtains happen to drop. It seems as though some philosophers have been leaving us clues behind. Socrates’ life was a devotion to knowing nothing at all – which is an analogy for death, the nothing par excellence. The ultimate wisdom that Plato teaches us is to be comfortable with death. It might be a rite of passage toward something else, but it could also be something else. What matters is that the climax of being human is to be part of the ending of one’s humanness. And so we have to perform this event gracefully even if it has to be in the name of an ideal, whether it be political or other. I think it seriously begins with the Greeks that we start to consider any relationship between death and wisdom. And this very long and tiresome history goes on to our modern times. Husserl’s devoted attention to perception and the experience of things even culminates on his death bed when he uttered his last words: “I finally understood everything.” Not even Jeff Bezos could afford this much confidence about life itself. If we turn to his student, Heidegger, we learn that the end is the source of all responsibilities. Without death there wouldn’t be any sense of ownership for what we do. Everything matters because we can’t experience it all. We have to choose, and these choices make up for who we are when it’s over.
These are just a few ideas amidst a sea of complexities and contentions surrounding the death phenomenon. When a clock says it’s night, I become concerned with the impossibility of death, our lack of linguistic access to it and the psychological suffering it represents. Although I admit that much of the suffering is materialistic – we are afraid of losing everyone and everything after all, afraid of changing the scenery we feel possessive about – I think it’s still indicative of something about the nature of our relationship to time and to our own body. But maybe this is self-evident. I just worry about the reality of death when I put into relation my body and my temporality. If my body puts me on the mode of anticipating what’s next in the future, if I’m always waiting for the next instant to succeed the previous one, then it seems as though death is an ever long wait for the next moment to come. Although, this moment never comes because my body can’t process it. So, I must be anticipating something beautiful when I’ll be on the edge of dying. I want to be stuck in a moment of joy expecting another marvelous thing to happen. By this logic, we only get one chance at dying and so we ought to do it right.
We might be tempted to think that this argument is reliant on a form of psychologism. But I believe it’s the experience that dictates the emotionality of it. Wisdom in death is knowing the fuel to the very last emotions we’re about to have is coming from the circumstances of our death; and the more practical thing to do instead is to wonder what makes this experience what it is and how its reality matches with the laws of physics and the principles of Being.