The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [33]
Today memento mori are seen as a bit gruesome. If you are Catholic and you go to church or to your parents’ house, you will see a statue of a dead or dying man. The rest of the time, like most everyone else, you live in a world that doesn’t show you artistic images of a dead or dying person. The rituals of remembering death have largely disappeared, from communal chest beating to ash wearing. Yet despite the way natural death is concealed in the daily lives of Americans, images of death have snuck back into our lives and nearly taken over.
We live with constant images of death. The news photographs are not billed as memento mori, but with a little consideration of the idea, it becomes clear that they are. There have been inquiries into what we are doing when we photograph the affliction of others, and publish it, and purchase it, recycle the paper, and do it again. Susan Sontag’s final book, On the Suffering of Others, is in part a recantation of her famous moral indictment of such photography of the early part of her career. She came to believe that looking at these pictures is more politically active than she had originally allowed. I am arguing that beyond politics, there is an old psychological need being filled. Given how often humanity has devised ways to look upon death in order to achieve happiness, and given how much we have sanitized our lives to free them of images of death, consider that the images of dead people that we see in the news, which is driven by our desires, are there to help us be happy. We shield children from news, but we still tell them to remember death. Think of classic fairy tales, and of Edward Gorey’s doomed boys and girls. Think, too, of the dead parents of James of the Giant Peach, Lemony Snicket’s Baudelaire children, and Harry Potter—all orphans. Children are going to think about death anyway, and it is much easier to think about death directly than it is to host the monsters that roam your head (and bedroom closet) when you try not to think about it.
Montaigne knew that thoughts of death could bring insight and liberation, but could be depressing in the short run. “It is certain that to most people preparation for death has given more torment than the dying.” He blames philosophy for making us think of death so much and then rushing in like a hero to save us from our fatalism:
Philosophy orders us to have death ever before our eyes, to foresee and consider it before the time comes, and afterward gives us the rules and precautions to provide against our being wounded by this foresight and this thought. That is what those doctors do who make us ill so that they may have something on which to employ their drugs and their art…They may boast about it all they please: “The whole life of a philosopher is a meditation on death” (Cicero). But it seems to me that death is indeed the end, but not therefore the goal, of life.
Remembering death seemed to be something that intellectuals fretted over, while the less schooled managed the issue in a more natural, more relaxed way:
I never saw one of my peasant neighbors cogitating over the countenance and assurance with which he would pass this last hour. Nature teaches him not to think about death except when he is dying. And then he has better grace about it than Aristotle, whom death oppresses doubly, by itself and by a long foreknowledge.
Only the educated think of death when they are healthy, “dine worse for it,” and go looking for opportunities “to frown at the image of death.” More-common people stand in need of no preparatory consolation and rather just take in the shock “when the blow comes.