in the north field

 One thing I love about literature is that it quite often forces you to face the very daunting, very horrible reality of death. And of course, you can think about "death" without reading pages of text, but particularly, literature makes you think about death in ways you hadn't before -- whether that presents as a good or a bad thing.

Famously, death is a central topic of Shakespeare's Hamlet; and Prince Hamlet, in his famous "To be, or not to be" soliloquy, presents the idea of death as simply not existing. This perspective of death is probably the most incomprehensible to some; to cease existing is unimaginable, for all we have ever known is being. 

I certainly had a hard time understanding this concept myself, but interestingly enough, the pause that came over me did not occur while reading Hamlet, although this central idea is present. It wasn't until I was reading an essay on German phenomenologist Martin Heidegger's "modes of being," specifically the mode "being-towards-death," that I actually had to reevaluate much of what I had previously thought about the death of consciousness. Heidegger insisted that to truly understand consciousness, it is imperative to realize the limitations of being, or more specifically, the inevitability of death.

William F. Lawhead wrote of this theory: "There is a big difference between entertaining the generalization "All people are mortal" and concretely realizing that "I will die." In this sort of experience I become aware that one among my many possibilities is the termination of all possibilities."

Separating the abstract idea of death from the reality of not existing is almost facing the absurd, because it truly seems absurd to lose the only thing we can ever be certain of, our consciousness. In fact, we have to be conscious to be sure of such a thing. I don't claim to understand phenomenology or the study of consciousness in the slightest, but even peripheral knowledge can open up so many doors to a new way of thinking that can quite possibly save your life, or nihilistically stunt it.

As I read The Stranger by Albert Camus for my Existentialism class, I remember growing quite bored with the narrative until I was abruptly struck with the intensity of Meursault's story. That novel is a wonderful embodiment of the absurdity of death, and I couldn't help but take from it that, when faced with death, we matter just as little as everyone else, but we also matter just as much. Death treats everyone the same. I don't believe in any such collective consciousness, but isn't it true that consciousness, as we know it and only marginally understand it, exists to each human being in the very same way? And the termination of consciousness is, moreover, the same. To be, or not to be, it seems to place us in the face of shared absurdity.

I would go so far as to say that the end of consciousness extends across species, because to simply not exist? is crushingly hard to wrap your head around. 

I will finish this post with a poem along these very lines. I don't think I have had a more visceral response to a poem with any other as I have with this one, perhaps because it so plainly exposes the fragility and dearness of life, of consciousness; and the shattering, disruptive tragedy of its end. 

The Two Headed Calf

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this 

freak of nature, they will wrap his body 

in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north

field with his mother. It is a perfect

summer evening: the moon rising over 

the orchard, the wind in the grass. And 

as he stares into the sky, there are 

twice as many stars as usual.

-Laura Gilpin

Somewhere in Scotland, probably