Ivan Ilyich has his Rosebud moment

Ivan Ilyich died last night.

As death nears, Ivan Ilyich goes through various thoughts and emotions.  Tolstoy is phenomenal in being able to imagine the plight of a dying man and this thoughts.  But then, hey, that is why we value Tolstoy's writings, and will continue to treasure them, whereas everything in this blog will be mere ones and zeros of the cyberworld.

"Maybe I have lived not as I should have"--the thought suddenly came into his head.  "But how so when I did everything in the proper way?" he said to himself, and immediately rejected this solution of the whole riddle of life as something wholly impossible.

After the number of posts in which I have tried to convince myself (and this guy too!) about the urgency to figure out the priorities and to then accordingly shape our lives, I, of course, agreed with those thoughts that Ivan Ilyich had.  I would rather be mindful about my life's priorities when I am able than to regret about them later when I am dying.

Ivan Ilyich asks himself through his mental sufferings:

But what if in fact all my life, my conscious life, has been "wrong"?

I want to make sure I am able to echo in my own way Non, je ne regrette rien.

As Ivan Ilyich recalls his life, he feels that there was more "real" life of happiness the further back he went, to his childhood:

The more he moves through the memories from his childhood to the present day misery, the more the experiences are darker and darker.  As I read the sentences, I remembered many of my own blog posts, including this one in which I critiqued the fad of the "bucket list" of places to go to before one dies, in which I wrote:

 Imagine this: there you are lying on your deathbed.  You think not having been to the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall will be your greatest regret ever?  That your life was incomplete because you didn't visit that one place?  Given that the final thoughts can be incoherent, like theRosebud moment, let us advance that a tad to when we are not quite there, yet (though, there is always that probability of death striking us any second, like when I am blogging!)  The question still remains: life feeling incomplete because of not having been to the Taj Mahal?

 Even in that post, I had mentioned the Citizen Kane Rosebud moment.because I have been convinced for a while, and reinforced by talking with many older people, that some of the most enjoyed and precious memories are from our childhood.  Perhaps that connection is a reason why dementia leads people only to recall their oldest memories--it is nature's way of easing us into the end.  A couple of years ago, I wrote in an email to an old school friend that perhaps my own Rosebud moment will be me whispering the word "Neyveli" and nobody around would understand what that meant!

Dying is the last solo journey that we will take.  Nobody will come with us.  Ivan Ilyich finds that he is all alone on his deathbed:

In that lonely state, whatever he tries, his mind keeps going back to this childhood days.  Perhaps that is also why Tolstoy has Ivan Ilyich interact with his son, who is a schoolboy, before death arrives.

Now he felt someone was kissing his hand.  He opened his eyes and looked at his son.

And when death arrives, Ivan Ilyich thinks, "Such joy!"

"Death is finished," he said to himself. "It is no more."
He breathed in, stopped halfway, stretched himself, and died.

No empathy for Ivan Ilyich?

I have gotten to the halfway mark in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and I am being simultaneously offered real world checks to go with the fictionalized world of Tolstoy's.

A couple of days ago, father informed me about a death in the extended family of a 67-year old.  "Sixty-seven is young for these days" he said.  I wonder how he feels to bear witness to younger people, including his son-n-law, dying.  I recalled my graduate school professor remarking once, in a rare genuinely revealing moment, about his emotional difficulty in delivering the eulogy for a colleague who was twenty years his junior.

Yesterday, another update from father about another death.  Maybe I should stop calling my parents!  This time, it was about the demise of a 94-year old.  "He lived a full life" father said as he recalled various events related to the departed.

If death after a "full life" is acceptable, then what do we mean by a full life?  When do we reach that "full life" status?

Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich was having a wonderfully fulfilling life.  "And everything went on like that, without any change, and everything was very good."   Things started going bad after a fall that he didn't think mattered at all.  It started with a pain.  A mysterious pain.  And then, just like that, things changed.

And he had to live like that on the brink of the abyss, all alone, without a single person who could understand and take pity on him.

Tolstoy has set things up well, and from now on it will be Ivan Ilyich's introspective reflections on "Is there any meaning in my life that wouldn't be destroyed by the death that inevitably awaits me?"

When somebody else is suffering, moral questions arise in plenty.  What exactly am I supposed to about that other person?  What is the relationship between empathy and morality?

Not only does empathy seem to fail when it is needed most, but it also appears to play favorites.

If you have very good relationships with your family, you then feel their pain and suffering.  You might even cry because you can't bear to watch them in agony.  The neighbor across the hallway might be ill too, but we don't cry over their agony.  We play favorites?  Are we morally on solid grounds when we behave that way with different people?

Inspired by a competing body of recent research, we believe that empathy is a choice that we make whether to extend ourselves to others. The “limits” to our empathy are merely apparent, and can change, sometimes drastically, depending on what we want to feel.

Apparently research shows that we choose to empathize with others.  It is a choice that we make.  Ivan Ilyich is beginning to suffer from his illness and he is beginning to sense that his wife, daughter, and friends, do not seem to "understand and take pity on him."  Tolstoy's "humanities" and today's "science" seem to agree on human behavior.

Yes, there are many situations in which empathy appears to be limited in its scope, but this is not a deficiency in the emotion itself. In our view, empathy is only as limited as we choose it to be.

As I work my way towards the rest of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, I am sure I will understand a lot more about the human condition.  As you can imagine by now, understanding this existence is a part of my own "full life."

Respice Finem

The works of literature that I have read over the years are very few.  I simply do not have enough time to read many more of them, especially when I apparently need some time to play bridge!  After all, even though I refer to my home as the hermitage and myself as the idiot hermit, it is not as if I am cloistered in a Trappist monastery ;)

Speaking of Trappists (yes, the horrible pun intended!) perhaps you have not heard the following joke:

A Trappist monk can only speak once a year. After the first year, the novice monk said: "The soup is too cold."
The end of the second year, he said: "The beds are too hard."
Finally, at the end of three years, the monk said: "I'm leaving."
The abbot, who had not spoken for seven years, said: "Thank God, I can't stand this loud chatter all the time!"

Where was I?  Ah, yes, the works of literature.  The great works have gravitas.  They teach me a lot.  This post, is titled respice finem, and I have intentionally meandered through thus far, in order to make sure that you, too, get to know well what respice finem means:   "look forward to the goal."  Keep your eyes on the prize.

Reading The Death of Ivan Ilyich is not like reading the Economist.  I have to stay focused, especially when the characters have names that I do not run into ever.  Consider a few names from that book:  Ivan Ilyich, Praskovya Fyodorovna, Pyotr Ivanovich.  And then, there are Latin and French expressions every once in a while.  Like respice finem.  Or, il faut que jeunesse se passe.  It was not unusual for the upper-class of Tsarist Russia to speak French too, and the educated of those days studied Latin, which is why expressions in those languages often appear in the Russian literature of those days.

Alien names and expressions do not stop me from keeping going because I have a goal: to make meaning out of my life.  To solve my own existential puzzle.  Of course, plenty of easier routes exist--I can choose to believe in any one of the narratives that are out there, in which hundreds of millions of my fellow humans believe in, mostly because they happened to be born into them.  With rare exceptions, people are Hindus or Catholics or Muslims or whatever because they were born into and raised in Hindu or Catholic or Muslim families.  Where we are born and to which family we are born into is a mere accident--unless of course the narrative conveniently, and in a self-fulling way, leads you to believe that every accident was meant to happen in a certain preordained manner.

It is not that I do not believe in accidents: it is after all various accidental mutations that led us to be the humans that we are.  The existential puzzle is about all these accidents and how to make meaning out of them.

Yesterday, I was at a student's wedding--yes, an ultimate reward that no WalMart can deliver.  It was a solemn and traditional wedding at a church.  During the dinner after that, the friend and I were chatting with a woman about our age, and I asked her about the work that she does.  She explained about how she got to doing that.  "It takes a lot of work to find your own niche" she said.  I agreed.  How could I not when it has taken me a lot of work to be where I am.

There is a long way to go yet.  Which is why respice finem is so important to me.

They're here, they're here

"It is still more than 40 degrees every day" complained my father.  I quickly did the mental math for converting it to the Fahrenheit scale that I am used to now.

As I talked with him, I enjoyed the gentle breeze through the open window.  The high temperatures of 100 and 101 and the string of 90-plus days--all way above normal for this time of the year--have yielded to cooler temperatures and clouds in the sky.

After the phone call ended, I checked the mail. Yes, the books--the ones that I hope will make me wiser--are here.  It won't be the books' fault, nor the authors' fault, if I continue to be the global village idiot ;)

I decided to go with the same order in which I had listed the books.  The Death of Ivan Ilyich was the first one.  Death has always fascinated me, as the readers of this blog know all too well.  The fact that we will all die at some time is, I think, one of the truths that I came to understand early on when I was a young boy, especially after my grandmother died in the backseat of the car as we rushed her to the local hospital in the industrial township where I was raised.  Thus death, as much as it interests me, does not worry me one bit; it is the pain and suffering that I hate, and life is full of pain and suffering.

As I noted in that earlier post, the deep reads are the atheistic ways in which I attempt to arrive at an understanding of a simple question: if we are all going to die, then what is the point in living?  Why do we do what we do?  Which also easily explains why I had for a while wanted to read this work of Tolstoy's; in a review essay a while ago, I came across a quote from The Death of Ivan Ilyich:

Is there any meaning in my life that wouldn't be destroyed by the death that inevitably awaits me?

Life, as I understood it even back when I was a teenager, which is why I continue to march to my own drumbeats, is not anything like veni, vidi, vici.  But, what the heck is the meaning in my life?

Of course I don't expect Tolstoy to give me a one sentence answer to that question.  It is something for me to figure out.  All Tolstoy, and Nabokov and Steinbeck too, can do this summer is to guide me with their thoughts, similar to how others did in the past.  Hopefully, as I continue along this path, I will be able to answer that question as I lay dying.

Apparently, that is what Tolstoy also had in mind, writes Mary Beard in her introductory remarks:

If only Tolstoy's friends had remembered to ask him all those questions! I am sure the businessman will keep track of it and might even monetize those words of wisdom from my deathbed ;)

Thirty-eight pages have provided me with enough and more to think about.  It is time to get to the real world issues of shopping and laundry and cleaning and everything else--after all, they, too, help me understand what my life is all about.