Beyond Reason
- 2 years ago
- 17
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Valedictory free porn video
What follows is actual and self-explanatory, written by the author
about his own anticipated end shortly before it occurred.
Subject: Valedictory
If you're reading this, I'm dead.
(I guess that's what they mean by "cutting to the chase.")
I am by no means the first person to observe that death, & the
prospect of dying, is the pornography of our time. You can discuss the
most kinky & depraved sexual activity in polite company these days, &
nobody bats an eye. But mention the topic of death or dying...! On at
least two occasions in my life I have had friends who knew that they were
presently going to die. I would like to have addressed this with them, if
I could, but the conventions forbade it. People wonder how it feels to
know you're presently going to die, but that's something you don't ask.
But now that I am facing my own imminent extinction I'm going to
talk about it, & the conventions be damned. I have been diagnosed with an
essentially incurable leukemia, & as I write this I'm, for all practical
purposes, dead meat. (People are beginning to bandy the word, "hospice,"
about.) (Details presently.)
I apologize for springing this on you so suddenly, but I've always
tended to avoid the moribund, myself. They give me the creeps--as if they
were bad juju. I don't know whether other people share this superstition,
but the dying are never treated normally. So many things you mustn't talk
about when they're about... Since I wanted to be treated the same as
always, I have kept my mouth shut. But now all shall be revealed, & talked
about. If you find this disturbing, distasteful, or offensive, stop here &
go off & read some relatively acceptable topic--perhaps the details of S&M
sex between men &, say, under-age rhinoceroi. (Whips & chains...& tusks!
Woo-hoo!) Otherwise, I'm going to impose on your patience while I ramble
(&, I hope, gratify some people's morbid curiosity).
Details: my diagnosis is acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). It's a
killer. One's marrow is where blood is manufactured. The stem cells there
differentiate into red & white cells, platelets, & other formed elements
that enable blood to do what it does. In AML, some of these stem cells
have a mutation that makes them unable to differentiate. Life, & nature,
being what they are, these useless cells of course proliferate wildly until
they've squeezed out the normal stem cells. So your blood gradually runs
out of the formed elements that you depend on to live. It's a little like
bleeding to death, only slower--& leaving no nasty, gory mess to clean up.
Chemotherapy for this is possible, but rough. *Really* rough. Not
one of those affairs where you drop in once a week as an outpatient & can
probably get back home on your own. We're talking six weeks in intensive
care, sick as a dog, bleeding from every orifice &, if you manage to
survive all that, there's a 50-50 chance, at my age, of having gone through
all that hell for nothing. If you do get a remission, there's no telling
how long it will last, & my body has already been subjected to enough
insults & humiliations by Bitch Nature that the benefits of remission are
dubious at best. Moreover, even if I were cured, there would still be that
sarcoma waiting for its chance. So I have elected to duck the chemotherapy
& let happen what will. As I write this, I am living from one blood trans-
fusion to the next--like a modern-day vampire. Believe me, there are many,
many worse ways to die.
It's creepy, this, *deciding* to die. Because that's what I've
done, in effect. But you know, our culture has a tendency to value
quantity over quality. Not how good, but how much. But I'm the other way:
not how much, but how good. And when you apply that to life itself, in my
situation, there's only one conclusion you can reach. Sir Peter Medawar
would have had a fit. He was one of those who think that as long as you're
alive, in no matter how wretched a state, that's enough. Sir Peter is one
of my heroes, but in this particular case he was full of shit.
If I were in my twenties & in apparently robust health, I'd be
devastated by all this; but (a) I've been face to face with my own
mortality ever since my surgery in 2000 & (b) I'm 73 now, with a rich &
satisfying career & an extraordinarily rich & satisfying life behind me.
Nothing can take those from me.
My father, who was a Freemason, said that Masonry taught that man
was born but to die. A cheerful thought, no? But I suspect that Nature's
view is not greatly different: man is born but to reproduce & die. Once
you've passed on your DNA, or part of it, & seen it through to adulthood,
she's done with you. Well, I outfoxed her, at least a bit, by refusing to
pass on my DNA, but the old bitch is still going to have the last word.
And how do I feel about death? How does one react to the fetid
breath of Azrael, the angel of death? Supposedly, one is supposed to go
through denial, bargaining, anger, & finally caving in. I'm too arrogant
for denial; denial is for wimps. (Besides, I'd look pretty silly denying
something I've deliberately chosen by a conscious act of will.) There's
a fine line to be drawn here: you want to face up to your impending death
without flinching, but you also want to continue living as normal a life as
possible. Some pagan philosopher put it best: If you know you're going to
die to-morrow, don't let it cramp your style to-day.
And I have no bargaining chips: I quit smoking--alas!--a couple of
years ago, & I live a pretty healthy life style. So I'm skipping all that
until anger. (It's ironic--I always promised myself that if I got cancer
I'd start smoking again. After all, you're going to die anyway; what's
left for it to do to you? And here I am with leukemia, low on erythrocytes
& on the all-important hemoglobin that transports oxygen to my cells. I
need all the oxygen I can get, and can't afford to have any of it squeezed
out by carboxyhemoglobin, the reaction product between hemoglobin & carbon
monoxide. Oh, well.)
Anger--is that it? My natural impulse is to lash out: to say,
"From now on, the hell with everybody else. I'm going to live for myself
alone!" But that's no good, either; I've been doing that all along. One
of the peculiarities of my life has been that when I've lived for myself
alone, that's precisely when I've been of the greatest use, not only to
myself, but to everyone around me. It was my youthful fits of altruism
that unfailingly left me in some hopeless dead end, no good to myself OR to
anybody else: a burden rather than a contributor. So I've already *been*
living for myself alone over the last few decades, with the usual bene-
ficial effects for all concerned.
Beyond that, my feelings are inconsistent. On the one hand, I
resent Nature's great, final kick in the teeth--as who wouldn't?--on the
other hand, I find it a relief.
I resent it because naturally no sane man takes pleasure in
contemplating his own destruction, but also because, just when you're
beginning to understand what things are all about, it's too late & you're
dead. I've heard people say that once you see what things were all about,
your task on earth is done. But I say, that be damned for a task. Once
I've gained some understanding, I want to be around to enjoy the use of
it & revel in it. Around here, I mean, not in some hypothetical wuzzy
paradise that may or may not in fact exist. And don't tell me it's not for
me to judge; I'm judging, whether it's "for me" to do so or not.
And I resent the increasing disabilities, indignities, & humilia-
tions with which Nature tells you that she's getting bored with you & that
you're wearing out your welcome. The alarms, the repeated visits to the
physician, the repeated tests, the repeated trips to the hospital. (It was
the same in childhood, remember? If an unpopular child was at a gathering,
the other kids would mock & traduce her cruelly to show her that they
wished she would go home. Nature treats us the same way when she wants to
get rid of us.) And the discovery that you can no longer trust your body.
(This may be a uniquely male thing; reading de Beauvoir in my twenties left
me with the impression that women don't feel they can trust their bodies
at any age.) And the disfigurement of your body--swellings, blotches &
blains. Thomas tells us to rage against the dying of the light; but it's
not the dying that's the problem, it's the waning. The waning, not the
extinction. Nature is not your friend.
I'm sorry to abandon Pat this way. The bereaved have to suppress
feelings of resentment at being abandoned by the dying; Pat & I have
discussed this long since & I told her to go ahead & resent away to the top
of her bent. On the other hand, I'm leaving her modestly well off, & now
perhaps she'll be able to sell this house, which she's never really liked,
& move to some place she finds more congenial.
It is a relief because I will leave so many unpleasant things
behind me (think of never again having to do taxes!) &, more importantly,
will avoid so many unpleasant things to come. This new century is going
to be no picnic. The twentieth century was one of the most appalling for
anomie & wholesale murder, but at least we didn't live in an anthill.
In this new century, we will, and in that anthill I foresee a drastic
suppression of the individual liberties that make life worth living. The
only alternatives I see are widespread, devastating disease or widespread,
devastating war. This was one of several reasons why I never reproduced:
I didn't want kids of mine to grow up & live in such a world. For myself,
every time I read of some new threat to (or, sometimes, from) the environ-
ment, I think I'd just rather evade all of those disagreeable eventual-
ities; & if dying will enable me to, then maybe that's not such a bad deal,
after all. (This must be one of the reasons for that resentment on the
part of our survivors: we have ducked all that & left them to cope.)
And when you're about to die, you're *set free.* All our lives our
actions are constrained by their possible consequences. But now, you have
nothing to lose; there's nothing They can do to you, whoever "They" are.
Subject only to your responsibilities to those close to you, you can do
anything you want to do & don't have to do anything you don't want to do.
(The problem with that is that I have found no particular use for this new
freedom--but I'm keeping it in the back of my mind, just the same.)
Furthermore, if I die now, it will be at a point in my life where
the cost is minimal, or nearly so. For me the worst possible time to die
would have been in my middle twenties. By that time, I had invested more
than two decades of unremitting toil, of growth & learning, in the hope of
reaping five or more decades of payoff. To die then would have been to see
all that investment shot to hell with nothing to show for it. But now I
have enjoyed that payoff, in abundance, & while I'm greedy for still more
payoff, I have to accept the fact that I've gotten a good deal more--
extravagantly more--than I could reasonably have expected, so that if I die
now, I don't have much cause for complaint. If, as I do, you measure the
value of life by the cost of death, & if you measure the cost of death by
the imbalance between investment & payoff, then my life had the highest
value in my twenties, rising from zero at conception to a plateau at that
period & gently declining ever since. (It also follows that, contrary to
popular cant, my life is not of infinite value. The value of my life has
been variable; but infinity is a constant.)
But that's not what people wonder about, is it? They want to know,
do you (brrrr!) *fear* death? Fear it?--the fog in your throat, the mist
in your face? Well, at some animal level, I suppose I must. I assume it's
a biological imperative wired into any animal with enough of a nervous
system to feel fear at all. But my fear must be deeply suppressed, because
I don't feel anything like that consciously. Resentment, yes, but not
fear. And--for what it's worth--I haven't had any dreams that I would
think indicated fear. Strange. Maybe my unconscious mind knows something
I don't (it wouldn't be the first time); but I'm not betting on it.
And what do I expect after death? I have no idea. Certainly not
the Christian eschata--death, judgement, heaven, & hell. (Well, death of
course, but not the rest.) I hope I shall meet & know that sweet goddess
whom I've worshipped over the last half of my life. Logically, one would
expect oblivion. Severe trauma can cause temporary oblivion; presumably
death, the ultimate trauma, should also be oblivion. But that's hard to
conceive, especially for someone as intensely alive & self-aware as I have
been. If the long habit of living indisposeth us to dying, the long habit
of self-awareness indisposeth us to oblivion. In any case, I shall find
out, if one can find out, soon enough.
Regrets? They say that no man ever lay on his deathbed wishing he
had spent more time at the office. I'm suspicious of statements beginning
with "No man ever...," because human behavior is so varied that you never
know when you will run up against a counterexample. But certainly *I'm*
not going to wish I had spent more time at the office. I have few regrets,
in fact. Most of the reason is that my life turned out far better than I
ever expected in my early years. I never expected to be a professor. I
never thought of myself as the kind of man who got a PhD. I never expected
to be a published author, or a landowner.
If it should prove that my death is traceable to my twenty or so
years of smoking--which, according to my oncologist, it isn't--I don't
regret that either, & I certainly don't want my heirs to join a lot of
irresponsibles in suing the tobacco companies. That's sheer greed--&
evasion of responsibility. Damn that. I smoked with my eyes open, fully
aware of the dangers, & I accept full responsibility for the consequences
to myself. I want no meddler attaching my name to a class-action suit.
Most of my regrets are for things I couldn't help. Birth defects,
mostly. I regret that I was not born smarter. I especially regret that
I was not made more people-smart. I regret not having a stronger, more
athletic, quicker, better coordinated body. This disability, besides mak-
ing my childhood & adolescence a hell, because of the pervasive athleticism
& machismo among the middle-American gentile males with whom I grew up,
also prevented me from being as able a keyboard player as I should like
to have been--with so much of Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Liszt, Beethoven, &
Schubert off limits to me--or as good a dancer. This kind of innate
clumsiness isn't one of the things commonly considered birth defects, but
that's what it is, none the less.
I also regret that my retirement turned out to be such a washout.
I had hoped for a rich & rewarding post-retirement career, something that
would keep me busy for another ten to twenty years & would provide--in my
own mind, anyway--a sort of capstone to my life. (It would have had to be
in my own mind, since your life has only such meaning as you are able to
impose on it yourself, in your own mind.)
In my twenties I was bounced about by Fate in all sorts of unlikely
directions, a process that bestowed on me a breadth of background not
granted to most people (& that incidentally had the gratifying side-effect
of making me appear a good deal smarter than I actually am). This
accidental bouncing around left me with a wealth of ill-assorted, oddball
knowledge which has never been properly put to use.
Along with this bouncing about came a series of mysterious lucky
breaks, occurring at intervals throughout my adult life, thanks to which
I ended up much better off & a much better person than I would have been
otherwise. And what I looked for, eventually, was something that would
make me feel that all that bouncing & all that good fortune had not been
bestowed on me in vain. It seemed to me that such a series of extraordin-
ary lucky breaks should properly befall someone of some importance, not me:
someone who made a difference, a big difference, the kind of person about
whom biographies are written, the kind of person whose papers go to some
university library after his death, the kind about whom dissertations, &
for whom festschrifts, are written. Not a nobody like me. And not having
found this justification during my career, I hoped that it might show up
after retirement. I had no idea what kind of thing this would be, & I
didn't know how to find it (never in my life have I known how to find
things like this--don't think I didn't look; it's impossible not to look--
but instead they have found me, repeatedly) except by sitting & waiting
patiently for it to find me, as similar things have found me so many times
before, which, alas, it never did.
Fond memories? Oh, lots of those, chief among them my marriage.
When I think back & realize how little I knew about the situation I was
getting into, it chills me. But my unconscious mind must have known that
it was the right thing for me, & he it was who prodded me into taking that
crazy, ill-advised step that has brought so much joy, peace, & contentment
into my life. Better & better, year by year. Men who go on about what
wonderful wives they have are a bit tedious; nevertheless, I'm going to
bore you for a bit. The first weeks & months of marriage bring many
surprises, & it was my blessing that the surprises were all pleasant ones.
But in addition, as the years have gone on, we have become closer & closer,
& she, in particular, has been wonderfully supportive. I sometimes think
that in her case the Three Little Words are "Go for it." She has told me
that so many times. Never questioning, never doubting, always encouraging.
You hear of men who become achievers because their wives never stopped
pushing. I wonder. I suspect it's more often because the husbands
couldn't resist showing off: "Look what I've been able to do, Honey!"
But there are lots of other things, too. Of all the possibilities
known to me, I believe I had the good luck to live in the best time &
place. With all the appalling faults & shortcomings of our nation, I
nevertheless believe that all other places on earth are worse.
There's popularly supposed to be an ancient Chinese curse (actually
neither ancient nor Chinese, probably the invention of Raymond Chandler),
"May you live in an interesting period in history." Well, the 20th Century
was an interesting period in history, & I wouldn't have missed it for
anything. Interesting periods are great--provided you can observe the
fireworks from a safe distance, which I did. And not just the fireworks;
the fun, too: the music of Stravinsky, the choreography of Balanchine, &
the early-music revival; *Finnegans Wake*, the novels of C. P. Snow, &
those of Robertson Davies; Picasso, Wyeth, & Henry Moore. Quantum
mechanics & Goedel's proof; black holes & the 4 K background radiation;
computers & radar. From Sen. Joseph McCarthy to gay rights & the New Left;
from hearing this country called "Amerika" to the "God bless America" signs
after the WTC attack. What a ride it has been.
In my private life, I'm grateful that I lived such a rackety
life between my twenty-first & twenty-seventh years. I'm glad I had the
opportunity to sleep around as much as I did. I'm glad I got away with as
much as I did. One in the eye for you, Society!
I'm glad I spent a year living as a young lady's kept man. That
year with her, humiliating & shameful as it was at the time, did much to
make me the man I am now, & if you're wondering whether that was a good
thing, believe me, it was, compared with what I was at the time, or what I
was on the way to becoming. I'm glad I experienced & did so many things
that widened my horizons, while living with her--most of them illegal, or
at least improper. Yes, it shamed me at the time, but you know, we all
enjoy a disreputable past, once it's safely past.
I'm even glad I spent that term & a half at a theological seminary.
What a crazy thing for me, of all people, to do! Who could be less fit
to be a clergyman than I? It might easily have wrecked my life; it was a
classic instance of what I said earlier on about altruism in my life going
sour. It was a valuable & enriching experience for all that. I saw, for
the first time, an alien culture from close up; I met some remarkable men,
I learned some strange ins & outs of Biblical study & early church history,
& it was there that I made my first real contact with Hebrew, that lovely
language which has never since left me alone. It also brought me from the
boondocks of the Middle West to New York, where I belonged. (Peace, you
Middle Westerners who read this! I'm referring to Milwaukee in the 1930s
& 1940s, which really was the boondocks, not to the Wisconsin of the 21st
century.)
I'm glad I turned out to be so good at teaching & that I liked my
students & was liked by them. Such wonderful young people, & such fun I
had with them! If I hadn't finally gotten worn down by the commute, & if
the field of computer science hadn't started to drift in directions that
I found uncongenial, I would probably have continued teaching until I
dropped. At one point, that was what I hoped to do.
I'm also grateful for the series of chances that led me to take
ballet classes. Not my kind of thing at all, I should have thought, not
for a techno-geek like me; & yet my first experience of them, back in my
thirties, marked me for life. I remember wandering through an unfamiliar
building at Hofstra, in the 1980s, trying to find a committee meeting I
was supposed to attend, & suddenly walking into a vast, empty room with
mirrored walls, a railing along three sides, & a grand piano far off in
the distance. My heart skipped a beat: a dance studio, obviously. I was
surprised that the sight still meant so much to me, almost a quarter of
a century after those first classes. It was as if fate, or something, was
telling me that I'd be back taking classes again some day. Why? What was
the attraction, for someone like me with zero talent? Why did I spend
eleven more years floundering around, an obvious no-hoper? It wasn't just
the pretty girls, I swear. I suppose it was because, on those rare days
when everything went well, it felt so *good* to move that way.
And I'm grateful for the affection, & even esteem, that I've known
from so many people. After a childhood & adolescence marked by neither
affection nor esteem, except in rare & sporadic instances, this has been
very important to me. I thank you, one & all, for that; you've enriched my
adult life; you've been terrific to know.
From a longer perspective, it has been interesting occupying one of
these bodies, even with all its defects & disabilities, here on this in-
credibly ancient planet. I am no nearer knowing how I got here, where I
was before that, or where I will be after that, than I ever was. Perhaps
these answers will emerge after death, but I wouldn't bet on it. But what
strange creatures we are! And what a strange place this is! People write
about the strange planets & satellites we've discovered in the solar sys-
tem; but is there any place around here that's stranger than this planet?
--with its highly reactive atmosphere & covered with a sort of green stuff
that turns out to be fantastically complicated solar-powered systems of
chemical reactions, with other similar systems moving about in their midst.
And among them, us: naked, bifurcated sex maniacs, running about on our
hind legs, communicating by what Chesterton called an arbitrary system of
grunts & squeals, & producing marvels of art & science. (And among us,
*me,* possibly strangest of all...) With all the drawbacks & unpleasant-
ness, I'm glad I had a chance to be one of these creatures. But once was
enough. If there's reincarnation, it might be best if I were reincarnated
on some far-off planet at the other end of the universe.
My last words? Probably some unintelligible croak as I try to
speak one final word of love & gratitude to Pat; but my OFFICIAL last words
are cribbed from Lytton Strachey, who is supposed to have said, "If this is
death I don't think much of it."
Well, there you are. Not very profound--was it?--or very original
--after all that buildup. Indeed, I've hardly addressed the central issue,
the issue of being dead, at all. But how can I? I can't comprehend
oblivion, much less talk about it. So if I've done nothing but beat around
the bush, my excuse is that the bush itself is unreachable.
Maybe your time would have been better spent reading about those
rhinoceroi, after all.
Farewell...
Tom
Postscript for pedants: Yes, I know that the rhino has a horn, not tusk(s).
But as I wrote the sentence, "tusks" had a better sound to it, so I allowed
myself the liberty.
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