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By Root 1089 0

your soul, your flesh is going to leave your bones. It is a potent notion. In medieval times, monks often had memento mori in their cells, objects kept because they remind one of death—usually, real human skulls or images of skeletons. The great Renaissance sculptor Bernini designed a memorial for Pope Urban VIII in bas-relief: a tremendous bronze and marble skeleton, with awesome wings, holding a banner upon which the pope’s name is written. The skeleton is in the midst of ripping the banner in two. Bernini found a spot on the dim church wall that was occasionally hit by a beam of light from a high window, and had the monument placed there so that it would be nearly invisible until it was revealed in brilliant glory. The image was so striking that people had it copied for their own monuments, and these too became known as memento mori. Much of the history of remembering death is comprehensible as a kind of posttraumatic bliss. It is not easy to invoke, but it works. It can make you feel mellow and happy.

In other cases, the call to remember death is more an intellectual argument than a technique for internal transformation, and its result is not mellow gratitude for the life you have but revved-up desire for more life. The thesis runs as follows: remember that you should fill your days with exotic action, because you could die at any time. In 1922 a French journal asked a range of noted people to answer a question—one of the main literary-magazine devices of the nineteenth century (another was the essay contest). This time the question was: “An American scientist announces that the world will end…. If this prediction were confirmed, what do you think would be its effects on people…?” I love the gratuitous note that the scientist is American; it borrows our scientific clout to help sell the scenario, but it also feels a little like a premonition that American science itself may bring disaster. Anyway, here’s how Marcel Proust responded:

I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die, as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it—our life—hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly. But let all this threaten to become impossible forever, how beautiful it all becomes again. Ah! if only the cataclysm doesn’t happen this time, we won’t miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India. The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire.3

Proust then reminds himself and his reader that simple human mortality ought to be enough to get us in gear but, oddly, isn’t. In his own life, Proust neither visited museums, nor threw himself at anyone’s feet, nor even seemed vaguely interested in a trip to India. He liked to stay home in bed under heavy covers, eat stewed fruits, take tea and other drugs, and write his books. He did in fact die only a few months after he wrote this, not having gone much of anywhere. I do not agree with his own assumption that this was laziness. A lazy person could not even read the monumental À la recherche du temps perdu, let alone write it. The man made choices about how he wanted to fill his days. We know exactly what he would do if he had three months left to live: answer a magazine question, write his book, and generally take part in the great literary drama of humanity.

The idea that we need to remember death so that we will go to the Louvre almost sounds like there is a deathbed scorecard, or even an afterlife scorecard. There is not. There’s a wonderfully silly country music song, “Not a Moment Too Soon,” big in 2005, that claims that if we found out we were dying, we’d go skydiving, we’d go “Rocky Mountain climbing,” we’d go “two-point-seven seconds on a bull named Fu Manchu.” There is some truth to it. But remember, too, that we choose the things we do on a regular basis at least in part because we like doing them. Just