Austin Kleon

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Checking in with death


I found this in an old notebook, copied from this article, which later became a book. I was reminded of it yesterday when I saw a twitter thread by a pediatrician who works with terminal patients in palliative care. He asked the dying kids for the opposite of regrets: “what they had enjoyed in life, and what gave it meaning.” His summary:

Be kind. Read more books. Spend time with your family. Crack jokes. Go to the beach. Hug your dog. Tell that special person you love them.

These are the things these kids wished they could’ve done more. The rest is details.

Oh… and eat ice-cream.

When I was re-reading Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning last month, I was struck by his emphasis on imagination: how prisoners hold on by conjuring images of their loved ones, and how a patient can more easily sort out her decisions by pretending she’s lying on her death bed, looking back at her life: “Viewing her life as if from her deathbed, she had suddenly been able to see a meaning in it, a meaning which even included all her sufferings.”

The great poets and philosophers all know that death is what gives life meaning. (Montaigne: “To philosophize is to learn how to die.”) To check in with death is to check in with life. (This is why I like to read obituaries—they are near-death experiences for cowards.) As Ghost Dog reads aloud from Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s Hagakure: The Book of The Samurai:

Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.

Meditation upon death need not be serious. A favorite little book of mine is Japanese Death Poems, a collection of jisei, or death poems, written by Zen monks and haiku poets. It’s funny how many are light-hearted, like Moriya Sen’an’s, from 1838:

Bury me when I die
beneath a wine barrel
in a tavern.
With luck
the cask will leak.

There are modern English versions of jisei, like Clive James’ “Japanese Maple,” from Sentenced to Life, or, more recently, Helen Dunmore’s “My life’s stem was cut,” a poem from Inside The Wave:

I know I am dying
But why not keep flowering
As long as I can
From my cut stem?

The weird thing about being in what is, statistically, the middle of your life is that you have to simultaneously live as if there is no tomorrow and live as if there will be a thousand tomorrows. It never hurts to do a little deathbed check. We’re all headed there sooner or later…

Something to look forward to

When re-reading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning (after my bowl of soup), I re-underlined my favorite sentence: “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.”

I’d been struggling myself a bit with this re-read and Frankl’s emphasis on the future, how one must keep hope, keep his eye on the horizon. (Though I was particularly taken with his emphasis on imagination: how prisoners hold on by conjuring images of their loved ones, how a patient can sort out her decisions by pretending she’s lying on her death bed, looking back at her life.) I wondered how to reconcile Frank’s hopeful future-facing with my own feeling that life is more like Groundhog Day, and one should operate without hope and without despair.

Then I remembered Tamara Shopsin’s wonderful memoir, Arbitrary Stupid Goal, which ends with her father’s philosophy: That everybody needs an “ASG—Arbitrary Stupid Goal.”

A goal that isn’t too important makes you live in the moment, and still gives you a driving force. This driving force is a way to get around the fact that we will all die and there is no real point to life.

But with the ASG there is a point. It is not such an important point that you postpone joy to achieve it. It is just a decoy point that keeps you bobbing along, allowing you to find ecstacy in the small things, the unexpected, and the everyday.

What happens when you reach the stupid goal? Then what? You just find a new ASG.

Almost immediately after I put these two together, my mind brought up a third thing from the file: Matthew McConaughey’s 2014 Oscar acceptance speech, which is profound if you limit it to the beginning, in which he said he needed three things each day: “One of them is something to look up to, another is something to look forward to, and another is someone to chase.” (If only he’d ended it there! His explanation sort of ruins it.)

The second needed item on McConaughey’s list is emphasized by another thespian, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, in her episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee:

Here’s something that my mom said to me and I think it’s very true in terms of happiness: You have to always have something to look forward to. It can be a very minor thing, and it can be a major thing. But you always have to have something you’re looking forward to next.

Oh, how high and low, treasure and trash mix in my mind, forming clumps I call thoughts!

Soup

Yesterday I was not, to put it in Dostoevsky’s terms, worthy of my sufferings. So I went out for ramen. I took Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning with me. My copy is an old paperback that belongs to my father-in-law. I’m borrowing it. I have been borrowing it for over a decade.

The first time I read the book was 8 years ago on lunch breaks in the library at the law school I worked for. I loved it then, not just for the words or the message, but for my father-in-law’s teenage underlines and perfect cursive marginalia. I knew my wife when she was young had read the same copy, and I wished that she had made her own underlines, maybe with a red pencil, to differentiate them from her dad’s, and then I would’ve added my own, maybe with a blue pencil. Instead, I took notes on a few index cards and left them as bookmarks.

I was about to crack it again yesterday, when my bowl of ramen came out quicker than I expected. So I let the paperback sit there on the counter as I slurped soup.

Frankl writes a lot about soup. In the concentration camp, soup was life. A cigarette could be traded for a bowl. Cooks would favor some prisoners by ladling from the bottom of the pot for bits of potato or peas, while shorting others by skimming off the top broth. The men told jokes about how they envisioned attending dinner parties in the future where they would suddenly forget themselves and beg the hostess to serve the soup “from the bottom!”

I took my time with the ramen. It was so delicious that at the end I lifted the bowl with two hands and swallowed the very last drop. I felt my spirits lift immediately.

I re-read the book at home this morning, adding my own notes and underlines this time, but in that moment back at the restaurant, I decided I didn’t really need the book. What I needed was the soup.

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