End of Year Musings!

End of Year Musings

There is a scene in Paul Auster’s Sunset Park (2010) where on New Year’s Eve the acclaimed publisher Morris Heller asks himself how many dead bodies he has set eyes on as he finds himself overwhelmed by a series of images of death that unfold in his mind. He envisions the putrefying body of the swarthy sexy Hollywood heartthrob of the golden age of cinema, Steve Cochran as it is drifting across the ocean with three young women accompanying him, who, not knowing anything about sailing, had assumed that they would never touch land again. As outlandish as that image seems, it did actually take place back in 1965 when Cochran had unexpectedly died on his yacht at the youngish age of forty-eight seemingly succumbing to a lung infection.  New Year’s Eve does happen to be a time for such meanderings of the mind as one contemplates the figurative death of one year as it gives way to the next and, perhaps, in a spirit akin to that of Thomas Hardy who on the dying hours of the nineteenth century imagined the “Century’s corpse outleant” when a darkling thrush seems to suggest that in the midst of the doom and gloom that pervades the air hovering over the detritus of the dying century, there may be an element of “blessed Hope;” yet, even that is tinged with despair especially in view of the likelihood that it is hearkening back to the “darkling plain” of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) which is destitute of joy, light and love. However, one would always like to believe otherwise. The darkening thoughts of death conflate with the desolate landscape that tends to be before of us at this point of the year, in this part of the world as we contemplate on death prior to being suffused with a yearning for new beginnings.

Finding myself alone (but not lonely) on New Year’s Eve, I, too, thought about the number of actual dead bodies I had set eyes on. To my surprise, there had been only three: all in their prime. The first belonged to a young man of twenty-four who gained posthumous acclaim in the wake of his death that came as a result of a senseless shooting at parliament hill in 2014. I recall finding myself before the lifeless body of a handsome young man as copious tears coursed down my cheeks. I had been imagining how Cirillo would be making it to middle age; how his young son would be growing into a young man; how he would blossom in his role as a guardian of the nation... Images of the life that could have been but was no more would come to haunt me for days on end. In February 2015, I found myself standing before another promising life that had been snatched away too soon by the tentacles of death: a twenty-eight year old psychology student of a classmate of mine who had got off in the middle of the highway in Montreal to check his car only to be struck by oncoming traffic. “... any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.” The third and last one bore the hallmarks of a self-willed death. It was the sudden death of a fifteen year old in the full bloom of spring and as I stood by the body that bore makeup in the fashion of her indigenous ancestors, I found it hard to believe that what was before me was but an earthly husk destitute of life as she (‘it’) looked as she (‘it’) was ready for the bridal chamber and not the funereal crypt. I hoped for a unio mystico on a more sparkling plain of existence than the one she had departed from.

All of those deaths, I found especially poignant, in light of the absence of the praemia vitae that punctuate our lives as hallmarks of success; as milestones that ought to be traversed and without which, it is as if one has lived a meaningless life or no life at all.

Indeed, New Year’s Eve is the time of such reckonings as we take stock of how many praemia vitae we have acquired and how many more time do we have to go for.

Yet, notwithstanding the brevity of our lives that is premised upon the ontological certitude of death that is intertwined with our being on this planet, a longevity that would span the infinite expanse of the universe would do us little service as can be seen in the example of Karel Capek’s “The Makropolous Secret” (first performance 1922), in which, the eponymous character, who has come to adopt a league of other appellations in the course of centuries, bemoans the lack of sympathy for mankind that has come as a result of the burden of her years.  Also, in Groundhog’s Day (1993), the lead character, Phil Connors, ends up getting caught in a time loop that gives him an infinite amount of time; yet, he yearns to be restored to his previous mode of existence, for, notwithstanding the auto-didactic range of activities that timelessness seems to allow, it robs one of any modicum of happiness; of any possibility for a sense of grounded-ness on a planet, which itself is transitory in the grand scheme of the universe.

In the end, what measures the so-called praemia vitae of life, as Philip Carey in Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (1915) muses, is the “complexity of the pattern”  that constitutes one’s life, in which, neither happiness nor pain quite matter.

On the other hand, I am tempted to take note of what Paul Auster writes in his New York Trilogy, namely, that “In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose.”

Upon mulling over both observations, I am inclined to say that as contradictory as the two may sound, they are not, in that, they reflect two ways of looking at life: one in medias res, another sub specie aeternitatis. Life is ultimately what we make of and invest in it, simply put. However, it is hoped that we will be given the chance to weave patterns of our choice into the warp and woof of our lives without being bogged down by the weight of existential exigencies, or even worse, of what we as a race have made Life to be. Along the same lines, when comparing the recent washing ashore of a “Ghost ship” with seven dead bodies along the coasts of Japan with Cochran’s fate, one could deduce the difference between being given the means and opportunity of adorning the patterns of the tapestry of one’s life versus being deprived of such an opportunity. Thus it was that in dying days of the second decade of the century, I found myself being haunted by the aforementioned images of promising lives cut short (not to mention the thought of those who were plucked away too soon in the midst of the widespread protests that swept across the globe) and the urgency of peppering the Persian carpet of my life with as many colourful and complex patterns as possible. Carpe diem!