 |
| Universal by Jim C. March, 2004 |
I started the book a couple times. I was not drawn in by the descriptive shadows of the opening pages. The tone of the book is set right away: life ends in death. By the end of the second "snapshot biography" and tombstone, I knew this book. I didn't like it. It seemed so... "Britishly" depressing. Reminds me of Doris Lessing (one of my favorite authors). But disliking a book doesn't mean it can't open my eyes to another perspective. Rather than write about the book, I'm going to write about the topic, life ends in death.
At first, I wasn't going to read the whole book, and in fact, I didn't read the whole book. I browsed through many of the life snapshots. But I wanted to understand why I found the book so heavy and, if not depressing, at least repetitively "half empty, and he's still drinking."
The descriptions of children dying were the most impactful. They reminded me of my time as a young married college student commuting to Stanford from Oakland every weekday. I'd catch the bus at the Keller Avenue exit on Interstate 580 at about 6:30 a.m., dropped at Encina Hall, Stanford about 8:00 a.m. I'd spend much of my commute looking out the bus window, pondering the meaning of life.
It was at sunrise, one morning, crossing the old Dumbarton Bridge, when I struggled with the concept of God in the Christian tradition. Why would a loving God take children? Later, I would frame the issue differently: What philosophy of life could possibly fit with the death of children?
In his book, Ben Reeves, points out this conflict, too. He includes heart-rendering stories of children who meet death. I have struggled with the idea of the death of children my whole life. Most notably, a premonition I had when I was an adolescent. I was just beginning to think about children, about my own children. In the premonition, my three children are massacred in a ruthless volley of machine gun fire(2). What is life, if it is can be so pointlessly, carelessly ended?
My premonition did not come true, but my thoughts on the death of children continued to be a test for me as I waded through the search for the meaning of life, and the meaning of my life.
Today, confronted with death as friends and relatives die around me, I have come to some peace around my own death, and the death of children. In a nutshell, here's my thinking:
- Life on this planet is the result of a very long experiment (aka evolution).
- My life is the result of a series of events over the course of billions of years (longer, if you include the necessary (and sufficient?) creation of the sun and the planet).
- Specifically, my DNA has origins in life that began billions of years ago. How many "great's" does that make my oldest grandfather? Beyond my comprehension!
- The ability to be aware of one's own life is relatively new, perhaps less than 600 million years ago. And self-awareness has existed perhaps as recently as 35 million years ago, give or take ;-)
- Given that my life is the result of a rather long and complicated process, there arises a conflict/contradiction. The contradiction is the perspective of the individual in a system that is based on the survival of an entire species. By this I mean, my existence is due to the specific result of my mother and father recombining their DNA to give birth to me, an individual with self-awareness. I am aware of my own birth and my eventual death. But my life and death are nearly inconsequential in the evolutionary scale of life. In a real sense, on an evolutionary scale of millions of years, my life and death are not very important.
Warning! I am not saying my life in un-important, just very-small-important, what mathematicians sometimes refer to as epsilon-small, approaching infinitely small but never getting there. It is the sum total of all members of the species that is important. The question becomes, what is the limit of a nearly infinite number of nearly infinitesimal parts?
At birth, my brain was predisposed to make the world "all about me." As I grew older, I moved that perspective by learning to imagine perspectives of those not me.
Sometimes, expanding my perspective was thanks to genetic programming: adolescence broadened my attention to girls (mate selection), children broadened my attention to families (tribal/herd behavior, including altruism).
Sometimes, expanding my perspective was through learning and education (memetic transfer).
I am encouraged by my own exploration of this change of perspective, from me to us. My death has taken on a deeper meaning. It might be the end of me, but it isn't the end of us. A child's death might be the end of the child's life, but it isn't the end of us.
My contribution will happen regardless of my own awareness of it. But if I focus more on the us and less on the me, I can live my life intentionally contributing to something bigger than myself. Being aware of how my choices contribute to something bigger allows me to experience, while I am living, my life after death.
Why not celebrate the ways I have contributed: through my children, through my ideas, through my choices?
Thinking this way, I have come to a greater appreciation of religion. Religion helps individuals cope with their own deaths by giving hope that there is something after death. And there absolutely is life after death: life goes on, the species survives, mutates, contributes to the survival of other species.
My "religion," however, is based in science: understanding and contributing to evolution over geologic time. There is something after my death. I have done my best, in my short lifetime, to contribute to the survival of life on this planet. I hope this is enough to satisfy my ego on my death bed.
____________________
(1) Ben Reeves, Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt (Avid Reader Press, 2026).
(2) No doubt, this premonition was set in my brain following two events: my personal internalization of the atrocities of war (World War II in particular), and a visit to the Wax Museum at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco in 1968 with my family. The Wax Museum had a display of the murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family in 1918. The family includes a boy, Tsarevich Alexei, born on August 12, who was less than a month away from his 14th birthday. At the time I saw the exhibit, I was less than a month away from my own 14th birthday on August 13th! While viewing the Wax Museum exhibit, I had the premonition that I would have three children, all of whom would be murdered at the same time, as children. This dream would haunt me until my youngest reached 18. Looking back now, perhaps the premonition was not so far from the truth. My family would "die" with my divorce in 1995.
