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The motivational part of taking what is yours is a modern addition. In the past, the injunction was not so much to better yourself and your situation as it was to accept yourself and your situation. We have reason to attend to both messages. Aurelius put it magnificently two thousand years ago: “Set thyself in motion…and do not look about thee to see if any one will observe it; nor yet expect Plato’s Republic: but be content if the smallest thing goes on well, and consider such an event to be no small matter. For who can change men’s opinions?” Carpe diem, the favorite phrase of motivational coaches, is written in stone along the top left side of an old vaudeville theater that still stands in my Brooklyn neighborhood, built in 1904. Carpe diem fugit hora. “Seize this day: the hours flee!” On the right side it says Ars longa, vita brevis. It is to the brevity of life (and the endurance of art) that we now turn.

4

Remember Death

All the great graceful-life philosophies and all the great religions counsel people to remember death. Today we tend to want to forget death: our supermarkets make it seem like meat grows on white Styrofoam, almost bloodless, always pink. Dying happens elsewhere. We catch and release fish, then go have hamburgers. Human dying occurs in hospices, alone at night. Most people have not seen someone die, whereas, in past centuries, even young children were brought to deathbeds to witness a period of sometimes agonized dying, and then the much respected moment of transformation. This moment was as sacred and revered as the modern-day birth. Men of a century ago saw no births, or recordings of births, but they saw many deaths and recordings of deaths. Deathbed scenes were commonplace in literature and theater, magazine essay, and Sunday sermon. The idea was to educate people to have a good death and to help other people have one. For instance, an etching might show how the departing man or woman might reach up to God, and how the many guests should respond—for instance, that it was okay for some to look away, some to gaze with fixed attention, and for very young children to play beneath the chairs. Verbal descriptions of death offered a variety of models for how to behave in one’s suffering, how to make peace and find forgiveness, and how to commend oneself to God. We have childbirth classes where you see and hear about a splendid array of births; they had essays and sermons that described an endless parade of deaths. In the future, classes for dying might look very much the same as childbirth classes, showing some breathing methods to manage pain and fear, and showing the partner, or “death coach,” different ways of soothing the dying one. But instruction on death is not part of mainstream culture today. Indeed, studying it seems morbid, rebellious, adolescent. Valuing birth as a site for study and reverence and hiding death as a kind of profane, dark, secret, gross thing is, of course, a cultural trance. Cemeteries were often at the center of small towns and part of the life of the village; people picnicked there and daily visited their defunct friends and family. Even only a century ago, there were all sorts of customs around death that would seem bizarre and morbid today—for example, wearing a broach made out of elaborately twisted strands of your dead sister-in-law’s hair. It is also true that until recently, much of history considered the execution of criminals to be an edifying and entertaining spectacle. Death denial may have reached its height at the middle of the twentieth century, a time when revelations about the Holocaust and memory of two world wars may have occasioned a general psychological shutdown on the issue. In a famous little essay of 1955 (it was two short pages!), “The Pornography of Death,” sociologist Geoffrey Gorer pointed out that as the nineteenth century treated sex, so his time now treated death, and vice versa. Wrote Gorer,

I cannot recollect a novel or play of the last twenty years