Dear Fellow Mortals,
Welcome to Day 4 of Remember to Live.
So far, we have remembered that our time is limited, let go of some of the lives we cannot live, and practiced attending to the life in front of us. Today we look at that life from its end and ask what it is for.
If you missed an earlier day, or want to revisit one:
As always, I hope you enjoy and find something useful for daily life.
Remember to Live
Remember to Live is a 5-day course on the ancient art of memento mori. It explores how awareness of our mortality, within the constraints of time and attention, can teach us to live: stop postponing, be present, and welcome each day with gratitude. ***This course is available to Dying Every Day members.
The Fruit: What Is This Life For?
Remember to Live (Day 4 of 5)
One day, every life will be seen whole.
While we are living it, we see it in pieces: this job, that disappointment, the promotion, the move, the argument that took up a week. Only at the end does the shape become visible, and by then there is little time left to change it.
The Greeks told a story about this.
Croesus, the king of Lydia, was the richest man of his time. When the Athenian lawgiver Solon came to visit, Croesus showed him the royal treasuries and then asked who the happiest man Solon had ever seen was, fully expecting to hear his own name. Instead, Solon named an obscure Athenian named Tellus, who had lived honorably, raised good children, and died bravely defending his city.
Croesus pressed him. Was his own happiness worth nothing? Solon would not be moved. No one, he said, should be called happy before the end. Until then, call him fortunate.
Croesus sent him away, convinced that the famous wise man was a fool.
Years later, Cyrus of Persia conquered Croesus's empire. Herodotus tells us that as Croesus stood bound on a pyre, waiting for the fire, Solon’s words came back to him, and he groaned and called out Solon’s name three times.
The story is probably more legend than history, but the Greeks kept telling it for a reason.
Aristotle took the saying seriously enough to give it a chapter of the Nicomachean Ethics. If happiness belongs to a whole life, he asked, must we really wait for the end before we can say anything at all? He agreed that happiness belongs to a complete life, not a good season. But he located it in what Croesus never secured: character, the most lasting thing in a human life.
That is today’s question. Not “How long will I live?” but “How will this life look from its end?”
On the first day of this course, we met Ivan Ilyich, who knew that all men are mortal and never applied it to himself. Tolstoy gives him one more irony.
When Ivan graduated from the School of Law, Tolstoy tells us, he hung a medallion on his watch chain inscribed with “consider the end.” It appears in a list of the fashionable things he bought for his first post. Nothing in the story suggests he ever took it to heart.
Tolstoy introduces his life with one of the quietest and most devastating sentences in literature:
“Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”
Notice the therefore. Ivan was not a villain. He was capable, cheerful and decent. He did what people of his class were expected to do, and did it well. He married suitably, rose steadily through the courts, and furnished a fashionable apartment. He arranged his life so that it would be pleasant and proper, and it was. Most of us would call that a success.
Then, while showing an upholsterer how to hang the curtains in that apartment, he slipped on a step-ladder and, though he caught himself, knocked his side against the knob of the window frame. The pain did not go away.
As the illness advanced, what tormented him most was not the pain. It was the lie. His wife, his daughter, his colleagues, and his doctors all behaved as if he were merely ill and would recover. They treated the most important thing happening to him as an inconvenience, something slightly improper to be managed and not mentioned. The decorum he had served all his life now surrounded his dying.
One person would not tell the lie. Gerasim, a young peasant who worked in the house, took on the humiliating tasks of the sickroom without complaint. He sat through the night holding Ivan’s legs on his shoulders, because that position eased the pain. He did not pretend. When Ivan tried to send him away, Gerasim answered plainly:
“We shall all of us die, so why should I grudge a little trouble?”
Tolstoy idealizes Gerasim a little; he is almost too good to be true. But notice what makes him good. He does not argue for virtue. He simply remembers that he too will die, and hopes someone will do the same for him when his time comes. At Ivan’s funeral, he calls the death simply God’s will, something we will all come to. Mortality, held in faith, makes him kind.
Ivan had felt the question coming for weeks. Looking back over his career, he had begun to suspect that he had been going downhill all the while he imagined he was climbing. Each time, he dismissed the thought. How could his life have been wrong, when he had done everything properly?
Then one night, as he looked at Gerasim’s sleepy, good-natured face, the question came and would not leave: “What if my whole life has been wrong?”
Tolstoy wrote the story a few years after his own religious conversion, and he does not leave Ivan there. In the final hours, Ivan’s schoolboy son crept to the bedside and kissed his father’s hand. Ivan, who had spent weeks consumed by his own suffering, suddenly felt sorry for the boy, and for his wife. He tried to ask their forgiveness. And it was revealed to him, Tolstoy writes, that though his life had not been what it should have been, this could still be put right.
The fear he had carried for months was gone. In place of death, Tolstoy writes, there was light.
Someone near the bed said, “It is finished,” the words of Christ on the cross. And Ivan answered in his own soul: death is finished. A moment later, he died.
