If there is one universal truth about all life, from the gigantic dinosaurs to the microscopic DNA strands making
up a virus, is that it will all eventually die. Death lurks over life as a constant
shadow. In fact, the “dying process”, a process of increasing entropy, starts
the moment life itself begins. However, no living creature other than humans has
to endure their life with this deep-rooted and primal anxiety that life is evanescent,
a brief candle of individual conscious awareness with dark voids of nothingness
extending to the remote past and infinite future.
Of course, most of us, in the service of sanity, don’t fixate
on our inevitable death. We go about the world focused on worldly concerns. We accept the
inevitable and direct our energies to the mundane chores of living. Yet the recognition that
our time is finite is always lurking deep within each of us, helping to shape the choices we make, the
stories we tell ourselves and the physical and the spiritual monuments we create as a species.
From artistic exploration to scientific discovery to
religion, pursuits that truly separate us, humans, from all other species are our attempts to turn our ephemeral life into personal and collective immortality. Jean-Paul Sartre
once noted, “life itself is drained of meaning when you have lost the illusion
of being eternal.” So, it is no surprise that
across cultures and through the ages, we have
placed such a significant value on permanence.
Our dichotomy of an incredibly nimble mind in a fragile body has been beautifully captured by Ernest Becker who suggested “we humans live under constant existential tension, pulled toward the sky by a consciousness that can soar to the heights of Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Einstein but tethered to earth by a physical form that will decay to dust; Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he lives with an awareness that one day he will go back into the ground to rot to nothingness.”
According to Becker, we are compelled by such awareness to deny death the capacity to permanently erase us. We soothe the existential yearning through a commitment to family, a team, a movement, a religion, a nation—constructs that will outlast the individual’s allotted time on earth. Others leave behind creative expressions, artifacts that extend the duration of their presence symbolically. “We fly to Beauty,” said Emerson, “as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.” Once the domain of the Pharaohs who could afford to build pyramids or the supremely gifted who could conjure timeless art or everlasting equations, now even ordinary mortals like us could attempt at this "virtual immortality" thanks to modern technology.
Across the millennia, one consequence of our mortality awareness has been a widespread fascination with all things, real or imagined, that touch on the timeless. From prophecies of an afterlife to teachings of reincarnation, we have developed strategies to contend with knowledge of our impermanence and, offer hope for permanence.
What’s unique now in our age is the remarkable power of science to tell a lucid story not only of the past, back to the Big Bang but also of the far future. What is also unique is that unlike our pre-scientific ancestors who thought of the universe – the sun, the planets, and the distant stars - as eternal, modern physics have taught us that even such heavenly bodies – from planets to stars, solar systems to galaxies, black holes to swirling nebulae share with us in their impermanence. While for us humans the time allotted is measured in decades, for stars and planets they are in the billions of years, yet they also perish as surely as we humans do. In fact, the basic stuff that makes up matter itself would disintegrate once the decay of the proton starts, which is calculated to happen in 1035 years, a duration so long, it is meaningless for us humans, but this puts an upper bound on how long intelligent life could exist in the universe, even theoretically. Moreover, even space-time could disintegrate in the very far future. The fact that even those majestic and heavenly bodies, even matter and space-time itself share our impermanence is at once comforting, and terrifying.
One of the more uplifting stories from the Hebrew Bible is that of the resurrection of Jesus, being celebrated today throughout the world as Easter. The power of the story of life triumphing over death is immense and timeless and often repeated throughout human history and across various cultures. And this year, we are also going through a global pandemic that is sowing death and destruction around the world. So the resurrection story is an especially powerful reminder this year and takes on an added significance on how the human mind, when faced with existential threats, still could come up with such a hopeful and uplifting narrative to give meaning to existence.
References
1) Being and Nothingness: Jean-Paul Sartre
2) The Denial of Death: Ernest Becker
3) Ode to Beauty: Ralph Waldo Emerson
4) The Greatest Story Ever Told: Lawrence M. Krauss
