The only good thing about death ...

[Lance]

... is that many of us, in time, won't be around to see more deterioration of society, wars, worries about economy, food, natural disasters, and all negativity.

[Rach3]

I’m not afraid of death ; it’s the getting there.

[barney]

I’m not afraid of death ; it’s the getting there.

Precisely. Or, as Woody Allen put it, "I'm not afraid of dying. I just don't want to be there when it happens."

Lance, your thought has occurred to me more than once lately. I know that every generation, as it ages, thinks the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but I suspect the risk of that has never been higher.

[Belle]

I’m not afraid of death ; it’s the getting there.

My late father said the same thing regularly and he also said "nobody wants to live to be 90 - unless they're 89"!!

I feel the same as Rach 3. Yesterday a friend was here for his usual Saturday fat-chewing exercise with the spouse. He had singles a year ago and it's still driving him mad as it affected his eyes and the nerves in his head. We've known this man for 30 years and he's my spouse's closest friend. He looked at me and said quietly, "I'm getting to the stage where life isn't worth it anymore". Shingles side-effects are preventing him from sleeping, when he gets appalling headaches. He's usually an active (78y/o) man, but his life lacks equanimity because of a nagging and controlling wife. (We have pictures of her from the spouse's 80th birthday with a grim look and arms folded!). You couldn't find a nicer, more loyal man in the world - who would do anything for us. And vice versa. But 'her indoors' pulls all the levers.

There has to be quality; that's why music is so vitally important, as is learning new things and sometimes meeting new people (if only fleetingly). Travel is good, books are wonderful, films have incalculable benefit to me; mostly those made in earlier decades, as will be seen from my postings here.

I don't feel any more pessimistic about the world than I did growing up during the Cold War. But social media has been so corrosive of goodwill, humanity and civility that we should not be surprised that we all get the leadership we do.

But social media does have enormous benefits too; I get to come here and politically oppose the Left but to generally agree in the music section with people whose interests are aligned with my own!

[Lance]

Well, Rach3 makes a poignant statement about "getting there." I think all of us who realize the numbers are climbing, that is not "if," but "when." [And I might add "how." But Belle says a lot when we have music, books, the social media (I concur with you, Belle). I feel badly for your 78yo friend who lives with shingles. I never had it; poor pianist Artur Rubinstein had it and especially around his face, which impaired his vision. I see ads all the time to "get shingles shot" at your pharmacy. I haven't done it yet, but people over 50 better "watch out," they say. And Belle, I hope your friend's wife doesn't subscribe to CMG - she may bite your head off! They are lucky to have such good friends as you and your spouse.

[Belle]

(My friend's spouse wouldn't know classical music from a bucket of KFC!!)

Sometimes I listen to a piece of music - particularly Beethoven/Bach/Brahms - and a feeling of anxiety washes over me; "imagine not being able to hear this anymore?". Same for leaving family and also for missing out on what's coming down the line with technology. I want to see what comes after the A380 and planetary exploration, and I've often thought of the Wright Brothers and how unfair it was that they didn't get to see developments in flight. Or Edison. Or the Lumiere brothers. Or Beethoven and the concert grand. Etcetera. I guess we're free to speculate.

My father died 20 years ago this coming Thursday. On his deathbed I read him the Reagan letters, some of which had just been published by Time Magazine. One day he weakly said to me, "people said Reagan was a dope, but going by these letters he was anything but". Fortunately, unlike Ronald Reagan, my father had been spared the depredations of dementia!!

[Rach3]

I see ads all the time to "get shingles shot" at your pharmacy. I haven't done it yet, but people over 50 better "watch out," they say.

I've done no research, but I believe that if you had or were exposed to chickenpox during your life, the odds are medically very high of contracting shingles, which apparently is invariably a very painful, disabling condition. For those over 65, there is a special stronger dosage of the vaccine. If I recall, the vaccine is covered by Part B Medicare or a Part D Medicare plan. The age limit used to be 60, but was reduced to 50 another red flag.

[lennygoran]

For those over 65, there is a special stronger dosage of the vaccine. If I recall, the vaccine is covered by Part B Medicare or a Part D Medicare plan. The age limit used to be 60, but was reduced to 50 another red flag.

Steve exactly what Sue and I have-we have a friend who had it and said it was the worst pain ever. Regards, Len

[Ricordanza]

Unfortunately, I have experience with this condition. I had chickenpox as an adult in my early thirties, and shingles a few years later. The former was uncomfortable; the latter was indeed painful. When the shingles vaccine became widely available and covered by Medicare, I went to my local CVS and got the shot. I have no dersire to get that disease again, and I recommend that others get the vaccine as well.

[Belle]

Here's a typically interesting discussion with Dr. Richard Dawkins about atheism. The fellow talking with him is hugely intelligent too. I admire Dawkins for his honesty and I agree with the comments he made about Dr. Jordan Peterson's views on the Bible and his gobbledygook on that subject. It's possible to really admire somebody and yet not agree with everything he/she says.

Professor Dawkins talks about death at the end of the discussion. I must say it's always a compelling argument the professor uses against religion; the idea of the essential 'truth' of the religious myths as its nonsensical achilles heel is something Dr. Dawkins unpacks this very well.

Where I feel there is some weakness in Dawkins' rejection of religion is what I call a 'swiss cheese' argument; the philosophical and intellectual legacy are 'holes' in his argument which he has chosen to ignore. The huge intellectual architecture which has arisen as a direct consequence of the biblical narratives, the existence of Christ and a belief in the metaphysical - Thomas Aquinas, for example - built upon that 'tradition' into something intrinsically great on its own terms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaRVzooavRI

[jserraglio]

What John Donne Knew About Death Can Teach Us a Lot About Life

Sept. 10, 2022
New York Times
By Katherine Rundell

Ms. Rundell is the author, most recently, of “Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne,” from which this essay has been adapted.

The power of John Donne’s words nearly killed a man.

It was the spring of 1623, on the morning of Ascension Day, and Donne, long a struggling poet, had finally secured for himself celebrity, fortune and a captive audience. He had been appointed dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral two years before. He was 51, slim and amply bearded, and his preaching was famous across the whole of London. His congregation — merchants, aristocrats, actors in elaborate ruffs, the whole of the city’s elite — came to his sermons. Some carried paper and ink to write down his finest passages and take them home to relish and dissect them. Donne often wept in the pulpit, in joy and in sorrow, and his audience would weep with him.

That morning he was not preaching in his own church but 15 minutes’ easy walk across London at Lincoln’s Inn, in the center of town. Word went out: Wherever he was, people came flocking to hear him speak. But too many flocked, and as the crowd pushed closer to hear his words, some men were shoved to the ground, trampled and badly injured. A contemporary wrote in a letter, “Two or three were endangered, and taken up dead for the time.” There’s no record of Donne halting his sermon; so it’s not impossible that he kept going in his rich, authoritative voice as the bloodied men were carried off and out of sight.

A certain amount of ease around death would have been in character. John Donne was honest about death and its place in the task of living, just as he insisted on joy. Both his life and his work tell us the same thing: It is only by keeping death nearby that one can truly live.

Confronted with the thought of death, many of us perform the psychological equivalent of hiding in a box with our knees under our chin. But Donne saluted death; he wrote it poetry, he threw it parties. He had a memento mori that he left to a friend in his will, “the picture called The Skeleton which hangs in the hall.” For Donne, that we are born astride the grave was a truth to welcome.

Death — the looming fact of it, its finality and clarifying power — calls us to attention and wakes us up to life. Donne spoke it from the pulpit, in a passage from a sermon he gave in his late 40s:

“Now was there ever any man seen to sleep in the cart, between Newgate and Tyburn? Between the prison, and the place of execution, does any man sleep? And we sleep all the way; from the womb to the grave we are never thoroughly awake.”

Awake is his call. And Donne’s work laid out how: He insisted on the vivid, the alert, the original. His poetry is famously difficult, and the images can sometimes take all your sustained focus to untangle. That is deliberate. In repayment for your effort, you will look at the world with both more awe and more skepticism.

First, though, you must shake yourself out of cliché. In a time when other poets were still largely engaged in the “my lady is a perfect dove” game, he refused to play. Love was almost certainly not like a flower, nor a dove. Why would it be? But it might be like a pair of compasses. It may be like a flea. His women are never roses, birds or fawns, but they might be compared to a mythic sucking fish: They thrum with idiosyncratic life.

Bodies, doomed to decay, delighted him. He kicked aside the Petrarchan traditions of idealized, sanitized desire and joyfully brought the body to collide with the soul. His writing about sex is explicit, joyful and strange: a bodily salute to life:

“License my roving hands, and let them go
Behind, before, above, between, below!
O my America! My new-found land!
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned!”

He also loved the “trans-” prefix: It’s scattered everywhere across his writing — “transpose,” “translate,” “transport,” “transubstantiate.” In this Latin preposition — meaning “across, to the other side of, over, beyond” — he saw both the chaos and potential of us. We are, he believed, creatures born transformable.

And Donne reimagined and reinvented himself, over and over: He was a poet, lover, essayist, lawyer, pirate, recusant, preacher, satirist, politician, courtier, chaplain to the king, dean of the finest cathedral in London. He worked his way from failure and penury to recognition within his lifetime as one of the finest minds of his age.

He lived intensely, even for a time in which intensity seemed to be the hallmark. He sailed the high seas, rode through Europe, wore a hat large enough to sail a cat in. He was a man who often added the super- prefix to words that others would not think needed them: “super-infinite,” “super-miraculous,” “super-eternal,” “super-exaltation,” even “super-dying.”

If the human soul was visible, he believed, it would be larger than the world itself. “It is too little to call Man a little world; except God, man is a diminutive to nothing. Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than the world doth, nay, than the world is,” he wrote in “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.” Tap humans, he believed, and they’d ring with the sound of infinity.

But humans, he also knew, are unique in their capacity to ruin themselves and one another: “Nothing but man, of all envenomed things,/Doth work upon itself with inborn stings,” he wrote at age 37 in an elegy for a friend.

Donne was born into a Roman Catholic family in a time when the religion was illegal in England. One of his great-uncles was arrested in an anti-Catholic raid and executed; another was locked inside the Tower of London, where Donne visited him as a small boy, venturing fearfully in among the men sentenced to death. His younger brother, caught harboring a priest, was locked in a plague-ridden jail, where he died alone and in agony.

Donne married a young woman, Anne More, clandestinely and hurried by love, which derailed his early career and got him thrown in an ice-cold prison. Even after his release he and Anne were often poor and at the mercy of richer friends and relations. He knew what it was to be jealous and thwarted and bitter. He lost, over the course of his life, six children. And he lost Anne when she was just 33.

In his life, Donne walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute. And as he grew older, he grew drier and harsher, but he always insisted determinedly on awe. Donne believed our minds could, with work, be forged into citadels against the world’s chaos: “be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail,” he wrote in a verse letter to his friend Henry Wotton, when they were both still young men in their 20s.

We humans are both miracles and catastrophes. We must, he demanded, acknowledge both death and joy, horror and awe. It is an astonishment to be alive, and life calls on you to be astonished; but lifelong astonishment will take iron-willed discipline.

Wake, his writing tells us, over and over. Weep for this world and gasp for it. Wake, and pay attention to our mortality, to the precise ways in which beauty cuts through us. Pay attention to the softness of skin and the majesty of hands and feet. Attention — real, sustained, unflinching attention — is what this life, with its disasters and delights, demands of you.

And if a skeleton in the hall helps, well then: Bring on the skeletons.

[Lance]

THAT was quite a read! Thank you.

What John Donne Knew About Death Can Teach Us a Lot About Life

Sept. 10, 2022
New York Times
By Katherine Rundell

[jserraglio]

THAT was quite a read! Thank you.

What John Donne Knew About Death Can Teach Us a Lot About Life

Sept. 10, 2022
New York Times
By Katherine Rundell

[Belle]

Lance, you might appreciate this poem by John Masefield:

"On Growing Old".

Be with me, Beauty, for the fire is dying;
My dog and I are old, too old for roving.
Man, whose young passion sets the spindrift flying,
Is soon too lame to march, too cold for loving.
I take the book and gather to the fire,
Turning old yellow leaves; minute by minute
The clock ticks to my heart. A withered wire,
Moves a thin ghost of music in the spinet.
I cannot sail your seas, I cannot wander
Your cornland, nor your hill-land, nor your valleys
Ever again, nore share the battle yonder
Where the young knight the broken squadron rallies.
Only stay quiet while my mind remembers
The beauty of fire from the beauty of embers.

Beauty, have pity! for the strong have power,
The rich their wealth, the beautiful their grace,
Summer of man its sunlight and its flower.
Spring-time of man, all April in a face.
Only, as in the jostling in the Strand,
Where the mob thrusts, or loiters, or is loud,
The beggar with the saucer in his hand
Asks only a penny from the passing crowd,
So, from this glittering world with all its fashion,
Its fire, and play of men, its stir, its march,
Let me have wisdom, Beauty, wisdom and passion,
Bread to the soul, rain when the summers parch.
Give me but these, and though the darkness close
Even the night will blossom as the rose.


We should note that Keats and his finest panegyric on life and mortality, "Ode on a Grecian Urn", was less sanguine than Masefield and for very good reasons.

[jserraglio]

On Death Without Exaggeration

It can't take a joke,
find a star, make a bridge.
It knows nothing about weaving, mining, farming,
building ships, or baking cakes.

In our planning for tomorrow,
it has the final word,
which is always beside the point.

It can't even get the things done
that are part of its trade:
dig a grave,
make a coffin,
clean up after itself.

Preoccupied with killing,
it does the job awkwardly,
without system or skill.
As though each of us were its first kill.

Oh, it has its triumphs,
but look at its countless defeats,
missed blows,
and repeat attempts!

Sometimes it isn't strong enough
to swat a fly from the air.
Many are the caterpillars
that have outcrawled it.
All those bulbs, pods,
tentacles, fins, tracheae,
nuptial plumage, and winter fur
show that it has fallen behind
with its halfhearted work.

Ill will won't help
and even our lending a hand with wars and coups d'etat
is so far not enough.

Hearts beat inside eggs.
Babies' skeletons grow.
Seeds, hard at work, sprout their first tiny pair of leaves
and sometimes even tall trees fall away.

Whoever claims that it's omnipotent
is himself living proof
that it's not.

There's no life
that couldn't be immortal
if only for a moment.

Death
always arrives by that very moment too late.
In vain it tugs at the knob
of the invisible door.
As far as you've come
can't be undone.

-- Wisława Szymborska

[barney]

A couple of great, though very different, poems. Thanks both.

[Belle]

Plenty of hope for us all. This man is 105 and is seen on his motorbike in the Adelaide Hills. Vroom vrooom.

[Rach3]

And the incredible:

https://news.yahoo.com/paul-alexander-p ... 04181.html

[Lance]

I was reading all the good comments and thoughts about this topic, it seemed appropriate to read it now when the world has so much going on. JSerraglio put up on January 15th. Taken from that story about Donne, it seems as though he's on to something that applies TODAY, as embolded below:

"In his life, Donne walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute. And as he grew older, he grew drier and harsher, but he always insisted determinedly on awe. Donne believed our minds could, with work, be forged into citadels against the world’s chaos: “be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail,” he wrote in a verse letter to his friend Henry Wotton, when they were both still young men in their 20s."

[diegobueno]

My father used to say that he couldn't imagine living beyond 89 years old, and yet his 90th birthday rolled around and he was healthy and active. My wife and I took trips to see him every summer during these years, and he insisted on being the host. He took us places, made meals and wouldn't let me or my wife help, except maybe to set the table and load the dishwasher. I asked him once what he expected in the afterlife and he said "I haven't the slightest idea. I can tell you there won't be any angels with harps, that's for sure. I just can't believe that we just stop existing. God created us for more than that."

Around the time of his 92nd birthday, he and a number of ladies from his retirement community took a trip to see a local historical site about an hour's drive away. He drove them there, had a nice lunch there, and then drove them back. Helping one of the ladies out of the car, he went to take her wheelchair out of the trunk of the car. Unfortunately, he slipped and fell, breaking a rib which punctured one of his lungs. As the emergency crew loaded him into the ambulance he joked "Boy that's the last time I'll ever help anybody!"

And of course it was. The night before he died he told one of the nurses "I'm ready to be with Ruth" [his wife]. He couldn't imagine what the next world would be like, only that my mother had to be there. If there were a Hell and my mother were in it, that's where he would have wanted to be.

I hope to be worthy of such a death.

[Lance]

Mark, that is a very heartfelt and touching story about your father. This segment from below: "I can tell you there won't be any angels with harps, that's for sure. I just can't believe that we just stop existing. God created us for more than that." I hope he was incorrect about the angels and harps - and I hope there will be pianos, too! I quite concur with the last part of his statement as well. Thanks for sharing that story.

My father used to say that he couldn't imagine living beyond 89 years old, and yet his 90th birthday rolled around and he was healthy and active. My wife and I took trips to see him every summer during these years, and he insisted on being the host. He took us places, made meals and wouldn't let me or my wife help, except maybe to set the table and load the dishwasher. I asked him once what he expected in the afterlife and he said "I haven't the slightest idea. I can tell you there won't be any angels with harps, that's for sure. I just can't believe that we just stop existing. God created us for more than that."

Around the time of his 92nd birthday, he and a number of ladies from his retirement community took a trip to see a local historical site about an hour's drive away. He drove them there, had a nice lunch there, and then drove them back. Helping one of the ladies out of the car, he went to take her wheelchair out of the trunk of the car. Unfortunately, he slipped and fell, breaking a rib which punctured one of his lungs. As the emergency crew loaded him into the ambulance he joked "Boy that's the last time I'll ever help anybody!"

And of course it was. The night before he died he told one of the nurses "I'm ready to be with Ruth" [his wife]. He couldn't imagine what the next world would be like, only that my mother had to be there. If there were a Hell and my mother were in it, that's where he would have wanted to be.

I hope to be worthy of such a death.

[diegobueno]

Mark, that is a very heartfelt and touching story about your father. This segment from below: "I can tell you there won't be any angels with harps, that's for sure. I just can't believe that we just stop existing. God created us for more than that." I hope he was incorrect about the angels and harps - and I hope there will be pianos, too! I quite concur with the last part of his statement as well. Thanks for sharing that story.

My father was a preacher (Congregationalist) and spent his career thinking about people's relationship with God, and I think he felt that God encompasses such a magnitude of wisdom, knowledge, experience that we can't possibly imagine, and so any attempt to imagine God's kingdom in human terms is too limited; even the concept of a "kingdom" is a human concept. Why concern yourself with harps when dealing with a presence that makes singularities explode into universes?

Sometimes I amuse myself by imagining fanciful afterlifes, all of them rather mundane compared to whatever unimaginable afterlife actually awaits. In one of them you go to Heaven and are greeted at the gate by the worst enemy you ever had in life. If you can embrace that person in all sincerity, you are allowed in. Or you're automatically allowed in, but some people elect to leave. For instance Hitler shows up and Saint Peter is wearing a yarmulke and side locks, Jesus comes along and says "Baruch hashem" to the newcomer, and so on. Hitler's face turns ashen and he runs away.

[Belle]

All I know is that if there's a 'next life' I'm coming back to be a harpsichord continuo player for a leading baroque ensemble like Les Arts Florissants.

I remember relatives saying to me 20 years ago when my father died, "you'll be reunited with him in Heaven one day" to which I groaned, "one lifetime is enough thanks"!!

[Lance]

I'm sure there's something AFTER ... there HAS to be! And if you are coming back, I'd like to be your harpsichord tuner/technician (only they will be so perfect they never need to be tuned nor regulated!) So, do I get the job?

All I know is that if there's a 'next life' I'm coming back to be a harpsichord continuo player for a leading baroque ensemble like Les Arts Florissants.

I remember relatives saying to me 20 years ago when my father died, "you'll be reunited with him in Heaven one day" to which I groaned, "one lifetime is enough thanks"!!

[Lance]

Thinking about this subject just now, I am not keen about leaving without all the musical 'stuff' I've accumulated all these years. Why can't I take it with me? What a shame.