Of Graves, of Worms, and Epitaphs
Accepting the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, Toni Morrison said:
"We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives."
Everything we do, every moment of our lives stands against the immutable backdrop of death. We absorb fuel and eliminate waste and power down to recharge like our fellow mammals, but we also reflect and create. We poke our heads up fleetingly into eternity, as all living things do, but our species also gazes into the distant past and the unknown future, and ponders, and uses languages of different kinds to shape and share meaning. We don't just live our lives; we create the future with our minds and our bodies, with the transmission of culture in all its glories and sorrows, in all its diverse forms.
Yes, life is just a cosmic game of Whack-a-Mole. We pop up, look forward and back, eat a few pizzas and bingewatch GoT, and WHACK! we're popped back out. Our particular sentient configuration of molecules disperses and they are absorbed into new combinations. Life goes on because we don't linger.
Our perceptions aren’t bound by our own lives. We apprehend our own mortality, and we talk about it, all the time and everywhere. It permeates our lives.
Death is the great leveler; together with birth, the other bookend of existence, it is the one major experience every one of us shares with every human who has ever existed, who will ever exist.
. . . of comfort no man speak:
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,
Let’s choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke’s,
And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d;
All murder’d: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humor’d thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away respect,
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?
Richard II, William Shakespeare