The School of Life

Sarah Bakewell on Montaigne, Cruelty and Conviviality

There is a certain respect, and a general duty of humanity, that attaches us not only to animals, who have life and feeling, but even to trees and plants. We owe justice to men, and mercy and kindness to other creatures that may be capable of receiving it. There is some relationship between them and us, some mutual obligation. -- Michel de Montaigne (1533-92)

Michel de Montaigne was a Renaissance philosopher whose profound horror of cruelty was unusual in his own time – and perhaps it still is today.  This revulsion came from his belief that all humans share an element of their being, as do all other living things. ‘It is one and the same nature that rolls its course,’ he wrote.  We are similar to other animals – but even if we were not, we would still owe them a duty of fellow-feeling, simply because they are alive.

This obligation applies in trivial encounters as well as life-or-death ones. We owe other beings countless small acts of kindness and empathy. Montaigne followed the passage quoted above with this remark about his dog:

I am not afraid to admit that my nature is so tender, so childish, that I cannot well refuse my dog the play he offers me or asks of me outside the proper time.

He indulges his dog because he can imaginatively share the animal’s point of view: he can feel how desperate the dog is to banish boredom and get his human friend’s attention.

History has largely dismissed the significance of Montaigne’s thoughts on cruelty and kindness. But there are those who find in his essay ‘On Cruelty’ the signs that mark him out as the first completely modern thinker. Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia Woolf, wrote that Montaigne’s modernity resided precisely in his ‘intense awareness of and passionate interest in the individuality of himself and of all other human beings’ – as well as of non-human beings.

Even a pig or a mouse has, as Woolf wrote, a feeling of being an ‘I’ to itself. He went on to apply this insight to politics, reflecting especially on his memory of the 1930s, when the world seemed about to sink into a barbarism that made no room for small individual selves. On a global scale, he wrote, no single creature can be of much importance; yet in reality these ‘I’s are the only things of importance. And only a politics that recognises them can offer hope for the future.

For Montaigne as for Woolf, human beings do not live immured in our separate perspectives. We live porously and sociably. We can glide out of our own minds, if only for a few moments, in order to occupy another being’s point of view. This ability is the real meaning of Montaigne’s call to ‘be convivial’, one answer to the question of how to live, and the best hope for civilization.

 Sarah Bakewell is hosting Dinner with Montaigne on Wednesday 23 November 2011.  For further information about this and our other upcoming meals, click here.

Dying of Nostalgia; Thomas Dixon Explores Homesickness

Dr Thomas Dixon, writer of the excellent History of Emotions blog, recently interviewed Professor of History at Weber State University, and a leading historian of emotions in the United States, Susan J. Matt. Her first book, Keeping Up With the Joneses, was a study of envy in modern consumer society, and her latest work tackles another emotion: homesickness, in a book titled Homesickness: An American History (Oxford University Press, 2011) which explores how homesickness and nostalgia were transformed from deadly maladies to allegedly un-American emotions. 
 

 

Thomas Dixon [TD]: Hello, Susan, and thanks for talking to us. Perhaps I could start by asking you what got you interested in homesickness?

Susan Matt [SM]: The original impetus was that my own emotional experience of mobility didn’t match up with the mythology of American restlessness. Commentators like Tocqueville and Frederick Jackson Turner as well more modern observers all claimed Americans were naturally restless, that somehow it was in our cultural DNA to leave home. I didn’t find it so effortless or easy to move, and began to wonder if I was alone. Perhaps there was a flip side to American mobility–a hidden history of homesickness. Homesickness also interested me because it seemed in many ways to be the opposite of an emotion I had just been studying–envy. Envy sparks aspirations, pushes people forward, often causes mobility. Homesickness pulls backwards. Both emotions play a role in modern individualism in the U.S.. Americans are encouraged to repress homesickness so they can leave home, be independent, seek more of the world’s goods, act on their envy.

TD: It’s interesting that it was your own emotions that fuelled your desire to revisit their history. I suspect many historians of emotion are in that position. So, what surprised you most about what you discovered when you started digging around in the history of homesickness?

SM: First, how prevalent the emotion was. I thought it would be difficult to unearth, but instead, evidence of homesickness was abundant and easy to find in just about every archive I worked in. Secondly, and perhaps more provocatively, I was surprised at how many Americans died of homesickness, or nostalgia as it was called. I knew there had been European epidemics of nostalgia in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, but didn’t know of American ones. But indeed, the disease of nostalgia was widely known in the United States–during the Civil War, there were 74 deaths from it on the Union side, and more than 5,200 cases of it in the Surgeon General’s records. 

SD: It became such a problem that army bands were sometimes prohibited from playing “Home, Sweet Home,” which at that time, was the most popular song in the country. In peacetime, civilians suffered from nostalgia as well.  The prevalence and intensity of nostalgia and homesickness throughout U.S. history – from the colonial era to the present - ultimately led me to question whether we were and are the individualists that we are so widely reputed to be. I think we’re not.

TD: I’ve been struck too by the great power of the passions in earlier periods – to cause illness, madness or even death. Medical sources of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries abound with fatal bouts of emotion. Is it possible to pinpoint a date after which this changed – when homesickness and nostalgia became mere feelings rather than powerful and potentially fatal mental conditions?

SM: It gradually disappeared as a dangerous disease in the first half of the 20th century. The U.S. Army provides a useful gauge in its records. One soldier in the American Expeditionary Force reportedly died of nostalgia during World War I. Increasingly during the War, however, many of the symptoms associated with nostalgia came to be defined as signs of the newly established syndrome of shell shock. While the diagnosis of nostalgia stayed on the books up through World War II,  and while there were many reported cases of it among soldiers in that war, there were no deaths. In short, from the early twentieth century on, the number of cases of deadly nostalgia declined, although less lethal cases of homesickness continued (and continue) to abound. It seems worth noting that as nostalgia’s cultural meaning underwent this transformation, the tolerance for the acutely homesick declined, since their condition was now seen as less dire.

TD: Historically you clearly have a really fascinating story to tell about nostalgia and homesickness as modern emotions experienced, as all emotions always are, within a particular geographical and cultural situation, in this case in modern America. I wonder what you think about the contemporary importance of this research, and also of research into the history of emotions more broadly?

SM: The history of homesickness explains a great deal about modern American culture and our national identity. Adults in modern America have learned to repress overt expressions of homesickness, for it has come to connote immaturity, a lack of ambition, and failure. It is out of step with the ethos of modern capitalism, which prizes mobility and individualism. However, while they may not discuss their homesickness publicly, in daily habits and behaviors, American make their feelings about displacement manifest. From ethnic groceries that sell the tastes of faraway homes, to sports teams which symbolize loyalty to a hometown, to our addiction to Facebook, cell phones, and emails, Americans routinely show their preoccupation with staying connected to distant places and people. While we may think of ourselves as an individualistic society, our everyday lives suggest otherwise. And our history – full of people suffering and sometimes dying of homesickness - makes clear that mobility has in fact never been an innate trait of Americans. Instead, they had to learn to leave home, and they have still not completely mastered the art of rugged, restless individualism.

The history of the emotions offers historians and the public a new set of tools to assess the past. Rather than merely judging history on the basis of external behaviors, we can bring in people’s motivations and intentions. These often provide a completely different understanding of social life and revises many of our longstanding narratives about national identity.

 Dr Thomas Dixon is Director of the Queen Mary Centre for the History of Emotions. 

Image: American sheet music of ‘Home, Sweet Home’ arranged for piano and violin, c. 1870s. Source American History Online

David Baker on Reflecting on Death

Last Saturday was the Jewish Day of Atonement. For 24 hours, from sunset to sunset, we neither eat nor drink, we don’t wear leather (a sign of comfort and luxury), and we don’t wash or bathe. Synagogues are full – many non-observant Jews attend on this day – and the liturgy and music are raised to new heights of intensity.

Yom Kippur, as it is known in Hebrew, comes ten days after the Jewish new year, and during that time we are encouraged to reflect on the mistakes we have made in the previous 12 months – the friends we have fallen out with, the resolutions we haven’t kept, the dreams we didn’t act on – and consider ways of doing things differently in the year ahead.

As I sat through the services, a little spacey from the fasting, I found myself reflecting on what stops us acknowledging mistakes in “real” life and how it sometimes takes something as significant as an awe-filled religious festival to bring our lives back into focus. We all have dreams, plans, good intentions, and at the time we make them they seem so full of promise. Yet let them lie for a few days and they tend to get swept aside by the minutiae of life, so we find another 12 months has passed without having given them a chance.

I think – and this is a personal view – that our clumsiness with good intentions comes from being just a little too comfortable, which makes us risk-averse. Why bother changing jobs when our current one is “kind of” OK? Why get in touch with someone we have fallen out with when we have enough friends as it is? Why take up a new hobby when we have so many half-hearted ones already?

Steve Jobs, who died just before Yom Kippur, gave an inspiring speech to Stanford University students that is very much worth taking 20 minutes to watch in full on YouTube. In it he quoted the Whole Earth Catalog’s advice to “stay hungry, stay foolish”, and on Saturday I found myself making a resolution to try be a little hungrier and more foolish in life myself. I think one leads to the other: if you have less to lose, you will risk more. And more risk, in the end, means more reward.  

The prayers on Yom Kippur return again and again to the inevitability of death and our absolute inability to know when it will come. Jobs, whose death has unleashed an almost Diana-like wave of grieving, seems to have understood that lesson more than many. “Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life,” he told the Stanford students. “Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”

We shy away from thoughts of death, for obvious reasons, but perhaps Jobs’ own death gives us a chance to transform its influence in our lives from a terrifying prospect into a powerful motor for change.  As the old adage goes, we won’t look back on our deathbeds and think, “Thank goodness I stayed those extra hours in the office.” But do we really know what we will look back on with joy and satisfaction? Perhaps it’s time to give that some thought and engage with those things that will make our lives a little more meaning.

David Baker is a new faculty member of The School of Life.  His next session will be How To Balance Work With Life – 20 October and How to Find a Job you love – 22 Oct.  If you're keen to take stock of this and consider how we think about death and approach life, come to our next 'How To Face Death' class on the 15th November.

Head to www.davidbakeronline.com for some more.

 

Roman Krznaric on How to be a Muslim, a Hindu, a Christian and a Jew

There is an intriguing thesis at the heart of Steven Pinker's new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. The Harvard psychologist argues – contrary to popular opinion – that humankind has become progressively less violent over the past few thousand years. We might feel surrounded by terrorism, civil wars and gun crime today, but murder and warfare is in fact on the decline. And the reason? One of Pinker's key explanations is the rise of empathy as a force for social change: we are now more likely to look at the world through other people's eyes, and consequently take action on their behalves.

What I find missing in Pinker's worthy tome – and books which make a similar argument, such as Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilization – is a clear steer on how we can expand our capacity to empathise in everyday life. How exactly can we get better at it? And how can we integrate it into the way we approach the art of living? An answer lies not in the musings of psychologists or all those neuroscientists who have become obsessed with finding the empathic hotspots in our brains, but in the ideas of one of the great empathic adventurers of the twentieth century, Mahatma Gandhi.

His philosophy of empathy is embodied in what is known as 'Gandhi's talisman':

I will give you a talisman. Recall the face of the poorest and weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? Will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and yourself melting away.

The talisman contains a moral framework that each of us can choose to live by: to consider the perspective of the most marginal members of society when making decisions on ethical issues, and to ensure they benefit in some way. Gandhi challenges us to imagine ourselves into the lives of people whose everyday existence might be vastly different from our own. Beyond this, the talisman is a guide to confronting our existential difficulties. When we feel paralysed by doubt or entangled in personal problems to the extent that we don't know what to do, we can find liberation and direction through an act of empathetic imagining. The talisman may provide clarity in our state of confusion or indecision. 

Gandhi lived out his empathic ideals. He worked as a nurse in South Africa as a young man: during the Zulu rebellion in Natal, he nursed Zulus who had been flogged and left by the British, whose regular nurses refused to attend them. His experiments living on ashrams were also an exercise in stepping into other people's shoes. 'Our ambition was to live the life of the poorest people,' he said. That's why he tended goats and cleaned toilets, alongside leading the resistance against British rule in India.

But his great originality was to stress the importance of empathising with one's enemies. During the growing conflict between Hindus and Muslims in the years leading up to independence in 1947, he declared, 'I am a Muslim! And a Hindu, and a Christian and a Jew'.

The half million deaths that occurred during partition in violence between Hindus and Muslims showed that the moral challenge of empathising with one's adversaries was too great in that turbulent moment in history. But I still think we can learn from Gandhi's approach. Trying to look through the eyes of those whose views we don't agree with – whether it is a nasty boss at work, an argumentative sibling, or a neighbour who does not share our religious creed – has the potential not only to challenge our own prejudices and forge social tolerance, but can create new and nurturing human bonds in our lives.

Roman Krznaric is hosting The School of Life's Curry With Gandhi on 25 October. His new book, The Wonderbox: Curious Histories of How to Live, will be published by Profile Books in January 2012. He blogs on empathy at www.outrospection.org

Utopiascope

A string of articles that share a startling pair of words have appeared in the press recently: 'Capitalism' and 'Failed'. Communism, of course, is a word we easily associate with the word failure. Our gut reaction to the prospect of communism is similar to that that we might have to an over-enthusiastic choir leader rushing into the street and calling on us to spontaneously fall into perfect song. The result will, of course, be atonal, and we can rightly accuse the choir leader of having no understanding of human nature.

Capitalism on the other hand is more often presented as holding up a mirror to human nature. As Guy Sorman has written, “the free market is finally only the reflection of human nature, itself hardly perfectible.” Human nature can certainly be flawed, but it cannot fail -- it isn't a system that we artificially impose, we don’t have an assortment of other options. To say that something is in our nature is essentially to say that it's our base condition, our lot in life.

So, if capitalism can fail, then far from being in our nature, it follows that it is instead an ideological system that requires belief on our part. We may have thought that we were behaving as perfect cynics, ruled by our instincts, but in fact we were closet idealists. If capitalism has failed, then it means it never was in our nature. And that leaves us with a daunting and terrifying question: if the secret to economic and social harmony lies in living according to our nature, how do we routinely fail to live according to our nature?

Far from being fated to live by instinct, as sceptics or as cynics, it would appear that we are fated to live as idealists, dreaming and designing a new society just as our current model begins to reach its limitations. There is no perfect political system, but instead humans are involved in a process of imagination named utopia in order to uncover the values that they use to develop their political and economic systems. Human society runs into trouble when this process of imagination is discouraged and labelled avoidable.

Over the next few weeks, meandering through the philosophy of Walt Disney, le Corbusier, Plato, Orwell, Borges, and Ayn Rand, I will endeavor to show how our concepts of love, happiness, community, work, death, sex and family change shape as they pass from the hands of different social architects. Odds are that we won't find a single utopia that we would like to call home; but in visiting them, we may find the perfect therapy for a society that is undergoing great upheaval and change.

John Lidwell-Durnin is a writer and regular contributor to The School of Life.

F.S. Michaels on Monoculture and the Stories That Shape Us

"It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of the mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world." - Ben Okri 

As human beings, we’ve always told stories: stories about who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going. Now imagine that one of those stories is taking over the others, becoming something we take for granted as our very reality - a governing pattern that the culture obeys, a nearly-invisible framework that structures our lives and narrows our diversity, creating a monoculture.

A monoculture doesn't mean that we all believe exactly the same thing or act in exactly the same way, but that we share key beliefs and assumptions about how the world works and what our lives ought to look like. Because a monoculture is mostly left unarticulated until it has been displaced years later, we learn its boundaries by trial and error. We somehow come to know how the master story goes, though no one tells us exactly what the story is or what its rules are. We develop a strong sense of what’s expected of us at work, in our families and communities — even if we sometimes choose not to meet those expectations. We usually don’t ask ourselves where those expectations came from in the first place. They just exist — or they do until we find ourselves wishing things were different somehow, though we can’t say exactly what we would change, or how. 

Monocultures rise and fall with the times. In sixteenth-century Europe, the monoculture centred on religion and superstition (think of Galileo being accused of heresy by the Catholic Church for claiming that the sun and not the earth was at the center of the solar system). Roughly a hundred years later, the master story was about the discoverability of the world through science, machines and mathematics.

Now, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the monoculture is economic. Because of the rise of the economic story, six areas of your world are changing - or have already changed - in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. How you think about your work, your relationships with others and with the environment, your community, your physical and spiritual health, your education, and your creativity are being shaped by economic values and assumptions. And because how you think shapes how you act, the monoculture isn't just changing your mind - it's changing your life.

F.S. Michaels is the author of Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything, in stores now.
More at www.fsmichaels.com

Nigel Warburton on Something to Think About

In a letter to today’s Guardian an impressive list of philosophers (and, intriguingly, several comedians) endorse the idea that we need more philosophy in our schools. Philosophy, they point out, is useful in developing reasoning and conceptual skills, and has spin-off effects on performance in other subjects. All true. But philosophy, as those signatories well know, is more than a sandpit in which to hone critical skills that have application elsewhere. It might be diplomatic to emphasize transferable techniques picked up from studying it, but we should also remember that philosophy has a distinctive subject matter and a rich literature.

Philosophy is the practice of thinking seriously about some of the deepest questions we can ask ourselves about the nature of reality and how we should live. We all have to reach conclusions about whether God exists, whether killing is always wrong, and about how we treat people who are less fortunate than us – either that, or accept other’s views unthinkingly. In that sense, almost any thinking person is a philosopher. We are fortunate in being able to draw upon more than 2,500 years of thought and debate in reaching our conclusions.

Reading and thinking about the great philosophers of the past can be a valuable experience in itself, and is rarely a visit to a museum of defunct ideas. René Descartes put it well: ‘To read good books is like having a conversation with the most eminent minds of past centuries, and moreover, a studied conversation in which these authors reveal to us only the best of their thoughts.’ (from his Discourse on Method). In this conversation disagreement is often more stimulating than agreement.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could openly endorse the value of engaging with the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Mill, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and co. rather than have to justify philosophy’s inclusion in the curriculum solely on the grounds that it sharpens the tools of thought. We need something to think about as well as something to think with.

Nigel Warburton’s latest book 'A Little History of Philosophy' has just been published by Yale University Press and was reviewed by Julian Baggini in The Observer. 

Ben Irvine on Working Definitions

“I'm a bit of a perfectionist… See, for me, it's got to be the best, or it's nothing at all. Like, if things get a bit dodgy, I just can’t be bothered.”   Spud, Trainspotting

The Journal of Modern Wisdom, a new volume of essays of which I am editor, is imperfect. And I don’t care. Don’t get me wrong: I care very much about promoting wisdom. The point is: I believe that doing so is important enough that even imperfect wisdom is better for the wellbeing of society than none at all. 

To judge by the irate emails I’ve received from a few philosophers, you’d think I was working for the Thought Police. Apparently “you can’t define wisdom” – or at least not without, bizarrely, recognizing the impossibility first. That’s funny, because contributors Richard Layard, Theodore Dalrymple, Judith Rich Harris, Stephen Bayley and David Cooper, among others (not to mention numerous lexicographers), have all had a good crack at it.  

It’s tempting to dismiss the pedants by pointing out that if you can’t define wisdom you probably can’t define ‘email’ either, so they needn’t have bothered sending me one. But that’d be to fall into the same trap. Sometimes it’s preferable and more progressive to rise above constricting debates. That, indeed, is the key idea behind the journal; along with the contention that the more intellectuals do the same, the more society as a whole will be becalmed.

Those emails remind me of the scene in Trainspotting in which Danny “Spud” Murphy attends a job interview and tries to give the impression that he wants the job (otherwise the DSS will cancel his benefits) but without actually getting it. A delicate balancing act, which he clumsily fails to pull off. “It's got to be the best, or it's nothing at all”: the joke is that Spud’s ‘perfectionism’ is as unlikely to achieve perfection as anything could be. As Winston Churchill pointed out, ‘success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm’.

If, like me, you’re a recovered philosopher, you’ll see what my analogy is getting at. The definition (oops, there I go again) of traditional philosophizing is to demand perfection, whether in knowledge or ethics or wisdom, while doing none of the usual dirty work necessary to achieve these things in the real world. Scientists get nit-picked, psychologists hen-pecked, activists scoffed at, and politicians sneered at. Anyone who rolls up his sleeves and has a go – armed only with a working definition and a working mentality – can find himself the target of cynicism from phoney perfectionists.

So let’s do some more workaday defining. ‘Spud’s law’ states that if you insist on possessing only the perfect definition of an ideal then you are significantly less likely to bring about that ideal in the real world than if you attempt to do so by means of an imperfect working definition. Let that be the rallying cry of the Journal of Modern Wisdom.

Ben Irvine is editor of the new Journal of Modern Wisdom. www.modernwisdom.co.uk

 Image: Spud (Ewen Bremner) from Trainspotting - directed by Danny Boyle

 

 

 

 

 

Dr Mark Taubert on How To Think About Death

“Where was it?” said he to himself. “Where was it that I read of a condemned man who, at the hour of death, says or thinks that if the alternative were offered to him of existing somewhere, on a height of rock or some narrow elevation, where only his two feet could stand, and round him the ocean, perpetual gloom, perpetual solitude, perpetual storm, to remain there standing on a yard of surface for a lifetime, a thousand years eternity! – rather would he live thus than die at once. Only live, live, live! No matter how, only live!”  - Raskolnikoff in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment

This particular passage in the novel 'Crime and Punishment' captures perfectly that very chilling fear of death. I sometimes think of it when I see people as part of my work as a palliative care doctor. What must it be like to know that time may be short, that death is close and to live with this notion day-in, day-out?

I work in a hospice. At the time of writing this, I have finished seeing fifteen people on my ward round. Of these, some may have years to live, others months, some only weeks or days. We work to try and address a lot of the symptoms people can get when their illness advances. But we would not be doing our jobs well if physical symptoms were all we dealt with. There is a whole person here, with often a whole host of other people around them and they are of course frightened, have a lot of baggage and have questions upon questions. “How long have I got left to live, Doc?”. Our team have to address this very common and reasonable question daily. Rarely is it phrased that clearly or said in quite that straightforward a way, and unpicking what someone is really asking requires skill and time.

For many reasons it is a difficult question to answer. Every illness is different, although it may be called by the same name. Every individual is different. Every treatment has the potential to have a different response. Add in the newspapers that will inform of a new miracle cure on their front pages about once a week and you have more questions and sometimes dashed hopes. The truth is that no one really knows the right answer, no one is perfect at predicting the outcomes of a terminal illness other than to say that it is likely to lead to death at some point in time. If I personally were to find myself in a similar situation, as a patient or as a carer, I would ask exactly the same searching questions of whichever professional I was seeing. It is a natural thing to want to know. And it is not uncommon to discover that there is another, underlying question to the one above. Often the real question is "Are you someone who will listen to me and who will be frank and honest- when I am ready?".

How important this supportive communication is, was highlighted by a nurse who was dying of breast cancer. Days before her death she wrote: “There are so many questions, concerns and problems to face in the lightening ball mirror. To overcome the sense of powerlessness the traveller runs through a maze seeking someone who might actually listen to their pleas for help, someone who actually knows that the traveller is there.” (Bushkin E. 'Signposts of survivorship' Onol. Nurs Forum, 22(3), 537-43 1995).

Death is a certainty and we know it is inevitable. But some events in life bring it into much closer focus. The death of a friend or loved one, or being told you have a terminal illness, are just some examples. Health professionals can rely on the latest scans and blood tests to tell us what is happening within someone’s body at a given moment in time. Add to that some intuition, as well as past experience with similar pathologies and we might hazard a guess. Weeks, perhaps, days, not months? We are often inaccurate in our predictions, as research has shown. But what we can do is listen, discuss and maybe help the person to achieve what is important to them in whatever time they have left.

I try to explore what people are most frightened of: dying or death itself. The process of dying is for some the most distressing thought. Will there be suffering, pain, agitation, breathlessness? Then there is the perceived loss of control in those final hours or days. For a few, even the final years seem unbearable, knowing that the illness will catch up with them eventually. How futile an existence that must end soon! Then there are those with the overwhelming fear of death itself as a construct, that sheer panic when someone realizes that their essence, their being, their self will at one point no longer be there. Void? Nothingness? What? Yet again these are issues that need to be explored in the context of an individual and the people closest to those in this terrifying situation. And talking about it openly helps.

Let me join other writers on this site by inserting a quote from someone famous; Bob Dylan said “Those not busy being born are busy dying.” This wisdom in part depends on your outlook on life. Here in the hospice, we meet a broad spectrum of people who know they will die at some point in the not too distant future. Of course, they all have different outlooks and personalities. Some spend the last days/weeks/months/years of their lives focussing on living, some on dying. Most do a little bit of both. What makes me most happy is to see those people who know they are living with dying be able to lapse into moments of fulfilment and contentedness; to this effect we try to help fulfil some of their wishes, some of the things that make life worth living. Pain-free time with loved ones, enjoying a meal without feeling nauseated, organizing a trip or even just going back to their local pub for a drink or two are some examples of what we can try to achieve. Some think of hospices as dark and miserable places, but only yesterday I arrived on the ward and there was laughter, a patient leaning over the nurses station and telling staff and fellow-patients a joke (it was rude). No one was thinking about dying.

Sometimes, open discussions about what happens at the end can help people prepare, and they can address questions like where they would like to be in the final days and hours and with whom. Hopefully this collaborative approach means that less of us will feel like Dostoevsky’s afore-mentioned condemned man on his rock, but can prepare for death, with support, comfort and knowledge about what may happen, by living, not dying to the end.

Dr Mark Taubert  - Consultant in Palliative Medicine, Marie Curie Centre Penarth, Cardiff, Wales

Limited tickets are still available for the 'How To Think About Death' class on Wednesday September 26 at The School of Life, Russell Square. Click here for more details

Fionnuala Barrett on Goethe and Fashioning Ourselves on What We Love

Goethe said, amongst many other clever things during his lifetime that “we are shaped and fashioned by what we love”.  Like all other statements which reinforce the idea that we are captains of our own destiny, there is an onerous, if not a frightening, edge to this statement: one must take responsibility for one’s own actions.  If you are spending hours of every week in a vegetative state in front of the TV or wasting away hours scrolling through celebrity tweets – well, then that waste of time is no-one’s fault but your own, and is certainly not to be laid at the door of a tawdry, celebrity-obsessed culture or the crippling power of modern media to keep you enslaved.  As I said, Goethe’s statement is onerous, if only because it robs us of such comfortable scapegoats.

Goethe’s point can be mightily empowering, if embraced in the right way.  A prime example of someone latching on to this sentiment is Jay-Z.  In his 2010 memoir Decoded, Jay-Z says of his formative years that he and his fellows “were kids without fathers … so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history, and in a way, that was a gift.  We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves … Our fathers were gone but we took their old records and used them to build something fresh.”

Thus Goethe’s maxim became for Jay-Z an enormously potent means of overcoming all of sorts of familial and societal narratives which would otherwise keep the nascent rapper down.  He forged his own narrative and, in his own words, inspired the world he was to make for himself through a conscious adoption of that which he would love.  As a strategy for living well, it hasn’t served him so badly.

Fionnuala Barrett is a freelance writer who blogs at http://basilexposition.wordpress.com/