Entering the Void

The fact is we are all given a death sentence. Once you're born you begin to die. But let’s say you get some very bad news, as some people do, and you’re told that you just have six months to live. You’re life is now finite. Something like this was what happened to the neurologist Oliver Sacks when he was informed that he was dying. Sacks had always been enormously productive in his work as a doctor and writer, the latter feeding off the former, but as odd as it sounds the news he received only motivated him more in both his work and his life. In an Op-Ed piece (“My Own Life,” NYT,  2/19/15), he quoted David Hume in describing his state of mind, “I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution. I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study and the same gaiety in company.” Some might take a different approach when given such a prognosis. They might slip into melancholy and self-pity or decide that since their days were numbered, they were simply going to gratify all their senses and do whatever they want. The might argue that they have spent their whole life working, being a parent or attending to their own parents in their years of convalescence and now it’s there time, meaning a license for self-indulgence. Sounds a little like the prisoner on death row, allowed whatever he wants for his last supper, no? This is precisely the plot of Kurosawa’s Ikiru which translates as “to live.” The central character, a civil servant named Watanabe, learns that he is going to die. At first he indulges in a Walpurgisnacht with a Mephisto like cohort, but the pleasures of wine, women and song pale against the void he's facing (Enter the Void is by the way the title of Gaspar Noe’s film about death which, like Ikiru, also has scene of Tokyo nightlife) and he finally finds solace in the notion of helping others and in particular by building a park for children. The last scene of the movie depicts him on one of the swings in the park he has built singing softly to himself and it’s one of the most touching and indelible images in the history of cinema.

Die Hard Without a Vengeance

What if you were told you had 24 hours to live? You could have swallowed a poison capsule by accident or perhaps you had recondite knowledge of Armageddon. What would you do? Empty the bank account and go on a hedonistic odyssey in which you gratify all your as yet unfulfilled fetishes and desires? Would you purchase the high priced hooker (s) or gigolo(s)? Would you fly to Thailand and have the soapy massage or massage sandwich with two lovelies? Probably not, it’s too long a flight and if there were delays, you could be DOA. Under the theory that money can buy anything, you’d probably decide you can find what you are looking for closer to home. What if food rather than sex was the ultimate pleasure as far as you were concerned? Would you construct an elaborate Last Supper composed of foie gras, chateaubriand, cold lobster, naturally caviar and say no holds bar the world’s greatest dessert? Would you finally fork out for those Teuscher champagne truffles that had previously seemed wastefully expensive. This is the theme of Kurosawa’s Ikiru. In that case Kurosawa’s character, Watanabe, learns he has a year to live. He embarks on a Walpurgisnacht in which he attempts to gratify his desires in the seedy side of town, but materialistic pleasures soon prove wanting and he finally devotes himself to helping children by creating a playground. There’s a wonderful scene at the end of the film when with little time left, Watanabe sits on a swing, in the playground he has built, as the snow begins to fall.

It’s Not a Rehearsal

Edwin Booth’s Hamlet

“It’s not a rehearsal” has become a common saw, the laymen’s carpe diem, a term that’s become as popular as a piece of argot as “sounds like a plan.” We’re all familiar with the expression which is a barely disguised jeremiad urging us to live in the now, to live “a day at a time,” so as not to hold back from acting in the present, in the name of some unsung destiny. But actually the expression is a spiritual black hole. The underlying idea is if you’re going to die, you’d better live it up. The Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa understood the ambiguity of intention in his movie Ikiru which translates as “to live.” Learning that he is dying of incurable cancer, his main character Watanabe, at first has his Faustian Walpurgisnacht in which he indulges the pleasures he’s deprived himself          of during his life as a bureaucrat. But indulgence is ultimately unfulfilling and the only way he can find happiness turns out to be through helping others (in his case through the creation of a park). Even Epicurus, a philosopher, whose name is associated with the senses, argued for the golden mean. So looking a life under the aspect of impending death, which is, according to Heidegger the only way to have an “authentic existence,” the individual is actually faced with a choice. If he or she is to live every day as his last, then he has to decide if his or her last day on earth, his or her last supper, as it were, will be an occasion to grab for as much as much material pleasure as he or she can get or an occasion to do something for others. What will characterize the final act of our lives? Gluttony, generosity or something in between?