Death

Death.

by Maurice Maeterlinck.

I

OUR IDEA OF DEATH

It has been well said:

"Death and death alone is what we must consult about life; and not some vague future or survival, in which we shall not be present. It is our own end; and everything happens in the interval between death and now. Do not talk to me of those imaginary prolongations which wield over us the childish spell of number; do not talk to me--to me who am to die outright--of societies and peoples! There is no reality, there is no true duration, save that between the cradle and the grave. The rest is mere bombast, show, delusion! They call me a master because of some magic in my speech and thoughts; but I am a frightened child in the presence of death!"[1]

[Footnote 1: Marie Leneru, _Les Affranchis_, Act III., Sc. iv.]

II

A PRIMITIVE IDEA

That is where we stand. For us, death is the one event that counts in our life and in our universe. It is the point whereat all that escapes our vigilance unites and conspires against our happiness. The more our thoughts struggle to turn away from it, the closer do they press around it. The more we dread it, the more dreadful it becomes, for it battens but on our fears. He who seeks to forget it burdens his memory with it; he who tries to shun it meets naught else. But, though we think of death incessantly, we do so unconsciously, without learning to know death. We compel our attention to turn its back upon it, instead of going to it with uplifted head. We exhaust all our forces, which ought to face death boldly, in distracting our will from it. We deliver death into the dim hands of instinct and we grant it not one hour of our intelligence. Is it surprising that the idea of death, which should be the most perfect and the most luminous--being the most persistent and the most inevitable--remains the flimsiest of our ideas and the only one that is backward? How should we know the one power which we never looked in the face? How could it profit by flashes kindled only to help us escape it? To fathom its abysses, we wait until the most enfeebled, the most disordered moments of our life arrive. We do not think of death until we have no longer the strength, I will not say, to think, but even to breathe. A man returning among us from another century would not recognize without difficulty, in the depths of a present-day soul, the image of his G.o.ds, of his duty, of his love or of his universe; but the figure of death, when everything has changed around it and when even that which composes it and upon which it rests has vanished, he would find almost untouched, rough-drawn as it was by our fathers, hundreds, nay, thousands of years ago. Our intelligence, grown so bold and active, has not worked upon this figure, has added no single touch to it. Though we may no longer believe in the tortures of the d.a.m.ned, all the vital cells of the most skeptical among us are still steeped in the appalling mystery of the Hebrew Sheol, the pagan Hades, or the Christian h.e.l.l. Though it may no longer be lighted by very definite flames, the gulf still opens at the end of life, and, if less known, is all the more formidable.

And, therefore, when the impending hour strikes to which we dared not raise our eyes, everything fails us at the same time. Those two or three uncertain ideas whereon, without examining them, we had meant to lean, give way like rushes beneath the weight of the last moments. In vain we seek a refuge among reflections that rave or are strange to us and do not know the roads to our heart. No one awaits us on the last sh.o.r.e where all is unprepared, where naught remains afoot save terror.

III

WE MUST ENLIGHTEN AND ESTABLISH OUR IDEA OF DEATH

It were a salutary thing for each of us to work out his idea of death in the light of his days and the strength of his intelligence and to learn to stand by it. He would say to death:

"I know not who you are, or I would be your master; but, in days when my eyes saw clearer than to-day, I learnt what you are not: that is enough to prevent you from becoming my master."

He would thus carry, imprinted on his memory, a tried image against which the last agony would not prevail and in which the phantom-stricken eyes would take fresh comfort. Instead of the terrible prayer of the dying, which is the prayer of the depths, he would say his own prayer, that of the peaks of his life, where would be gathered, like angels of peace, the most limpid, the most pellucid thoughts of his life. Is not that the prayer of prayers? After all, what is a true and worthy prayer, if not the most ardent and disinterested effort to reach and grasp the unknown?

IV

WE MUST RID DEATH OF THAT WHICH GOES BEFORE

"The doctors and the priests," said Napoleon, "have long been making death grievous."

Let us, then, learn to look upon it as it is in itself, free from the horrors of matter and stripped of the terrors of the imagination. Let us first get rid of all that goes before and does not belong to it.

Thus, we impute to it the tortures of the last illness; and that is not right. Illnesses have nothing in common with that which ends them.

They form part of life and not of death. We easily forget the most cruel sufferings that restore us to health; and the first sun of convalescence destroys the most unbearable memories of the chamber of pain. But let death come; and at once we overwhelm it with all the evil done before it. Not a tear but is remembered and used as a reproach, not a cry of pain but becomes a cry of accusation. Death alone bears the weight of the errors of nature or the ignorance of science that have uselessly prolonged torments in whose name we curse death because it puts an end to them.

V

THE PANGS OF DEATH MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MAN ALONE

In point of fact, whereas the sicknesses belong to nature or to life, the agony, which seems peculiar to death, is wholly in the hands of men. Now what we most dread is the awful struggle at the end and especially the hateful moment of rupture which we shall perhaps see approaching during long hours of helplessness and which suddenly hurls us, disarmed, abandoned and stripped, into an unknown that is the home of the only invincible terrors which the human soul has ever felt.

It is twice unjust to impute the torments of that moment to death. We shall see presently in what manner a man of to-day, if he would remain faithful to his ideas, should picture to himself the unknown into which death flings us. Let us confine ourselves here to the last struggle. As science progresses, it prolongs the agony which is the most dreadful moment and the sharpest peak of human pain and horror, for the witnesses, at least; for, often, the sensibility of him who, in Bossuet"s phrase, is "at bay with death," is already greatly blunted and perceives no more than the distant murmur of the sufferings which he seems to be enduring. All the doctors consider it their first duty to protract as long as possible even the most excruciating convulsions of the most hopeless agony. Who has not, at a bedside, twenty times wished and not once dared to throw himself at their feet and implore them to show mercy? They are filled with so great a certainty and the duty which they obey leaves so little room for the least doubt that pity and reason, blinded by tears, curb their revolt and shrink back before a law which all recognize and revere as the highest law of human conscience.

VI

THE MISTAKE OF THE DOCTORS IN PROLONGING THE PANGS OF DEATH

One day, this prejudice will strike us as barbarian. Its roots go down to the unacknowledged fears left in the heart by religions that have long since died out in the mind of men. That is why the doctors act as though they were convinced that there is no known torture but is preferable to those awaiting us in the unknown. They seem persuaded that every minute gained amidst the most intolerable sufferings is s.n.a.t.c.hed from the incomparably more dreadful sufferings which the mysteries of the hereafter reserve for men; and, of two evils to avoid that which they know to be imaginary, they choose the real one.

Besides, in thus postponing the end of a torture, which, as good Seneca says, is the best part of that torture, they are only yielding to the unanimous error which daily strengthens the circle wherein it is confined: the prolongation of the agony increasing the horror of death; and the horror of death demanding the prolongation of the agony.

VII

THEIR ARGUMENTS

They, on their part, say or might say that, in the present stage of science, two or three cases excepted, there is never a certainty of death. Not to support life to its last limits, even at the cost of insupportable torments, were perhaps to kill. Doubtless there is not one chance in a hundred thousand that the sufferer escape. No matter.

If that chance exist which, in the majority of cases, will give but a few days, or, at the utmost, a few months of a life that will not be the real life, but much rather, as the Latin said, "an extended death," those hundred thousand torments will not have been in vain.

A single hour s.n.a.t.c.hed from death outweighs a whole existence of tortures.

Here are, face to face, two values that cannot be compared; and, if we mean to weigh them in the same balance, we must heap the scale which we see with all that remains to us, that is, with every imaginable pain, for at the decisive hour this is the only weight which counts and which is heavy enough to raise by a few degrees the other scale that dips into what we do not see and is loaded with the thick darkness of another world.

VIII

THAT WHICH DOES NOT BELONG TO DEATH