The Order of Time

THE SISTER OF SLEEP

The brief arc of our days,

O Sestius,

prevents us from launching

prolonged hopes. (I, 4)

In the third part of the great Indian epic the Mahābhārata, a powerful spirit named Yaksa asks the oldest and wisest of the Pandava, Yudhistira, what is the greatest of all mysteries. The answer given resounds across millennia: “Every day countless people die, and yet those who remain live as if they were immortals.”¹²⁸

I would not wish to live as if I were immortal. I do not fear death. I fear suffering. And I fear old age, though less so now that I am witnessing the tranquil and pleasant old age of my father. I am afraid of frailty, and of the absence of love. But death does not alarm me. It did not scare me when I was young, and I thought at the time that this was because it was such a remote prospect. But now, at sixty, the fear has yet to arrive. I love life, but life is also struggle, suffering, pain. I think of death as akin to a well-earned rest. The sister of sleep, Bach calls it, in his marvelous cantata BWV 56. A kindly sister, who will come quickly to close my eyes and caress my head.

Job died when he was “full of days.” It’s a wonderful expression. I, too, would like to arrive at the point of feeling “full of days,” and to close with a smile the brief circle that is our life. I can still take pleasure in it, yes; still enjoy the moon reflected on the sea, the kisses of the woman I love, her presence that gives meaning to everything; still savor those Sunday afternoons at home in winter, lying on the sofa filling pages with symbols and formulae, dreaming of capturing another small secret from among the thousands that still surround us. . . . I like to look forward to still tasting from this golden chalice, to life that is teeming, both tender and hostile, clear and inscrutable, unexpected. . . . But I have already drunk deep of the bittersweet contents of this chalice, and if an angel were to come for me right now, saying, “Carlo, it’s time,” I would not ask to be left even long enough to finish this sentence. I would just smile up at him and follow.

Our fear of death seems to me to be an error of evolution. Many animals react instinctively with terror and flight at the approach of a predator. It is a healthy reaction, one that allows them to escape from danger. But it’s a terror that lasts an instant, not something that remains with them constantly. Natural selection has produced these big apes with hypertrophic frontal lobes, with an exaggerated ability to predict the future. It’s a prerogative that’s certainly useful but one that has placed before us a vision of our inevitable death, and this triggers the instinct of terror and flight. Basically, I believe that the fear of death is the result of an accidental and clumsy interference between two distinct evolutionary pressures—the product of bad automatic connections in our brain rather than something that has any use or meaning. Everything has a limited duration, even the human race itself. (“The Earth has lost its youthfulness; it is past, like a happy dream. Now every day brings us closer to destruction, to desert,” as Vyasa has it in the Mahābhārata.¹²⁹) Fearing the transition, being afraid of death, is like being afraid of reality itself; like being afraid of the sun. Whatever for?

This is the rational version. But our lives are not driven by rational arguments. Reason helps us to clarify ideas, to discover errors. But that same reason also shows us that the motives by which we act are inscribed in our intimate structure as mammals, as hunters, as social beings: reason illuminates these connections, it does not generate them. We are not, in the first place, reasoning beings. We may perhaps become so, more or less, in the second. In the first instance, we are driven by a thirst for life, by hunger, by the need to love, by the instinct to find our place in human society. . . . The second instance does not even exist without the first. Reason arbitrates between instincts but uses the very same instincts as primary criteria in its arbitration. It gives names to things and to this thirst, it allows us to overcome obstacles, to see things that are hidden. It allows us to recognize the innumerable inefficient strategies, mistaken beliefs, and prejudices that we have. It has developed to help us understand that the tracks we follow, thinking that they will lead to the antelopes we are hunting, are in fact false trails. But what drives us is not reflecting on life: it is life itself.

So what really drives us? It is difficult to say. Perhaps we do not know entirely. We recognize motivations in ourselves. We give names to these motivations, and we have many of them. We believe that we share some of them with other animals; others only with humankind—and others still with smaller groups to which we see ourselves as belonging. Hunger and thirst, curiosity, the need for companionship, the desire to love, being in love, the pursuit of happiness, the need to fight for a position in the world, the desire to be appreciated, recognized, and loved; loyalty, honor, the love of God, the thirst for justice and liberty, the desire for knowledge . . .

Where does all this come from? From the way that we are made, from what we happen to be. We are the products of a long selection process of chemical, biological, and cultural structures that at different levels have interacted for a long time in order to shape the funny process that we are. About which we understand very little, by reflecting on ourselves, by looking at ourselves in the mirror. We are more complex than our mental faculties are capable of grasping. The hypertrophy of our frontal lobes is considerable, and has taken us to the moon, allowed us to discover black holes, and to recognize that we are cousins of ladybugs. But it is still not enough to allow us to explain ourselves clearly to ourselves.

We are not even clear about what it means “to understand.” We see the world and we describe it: we give it an order. We know little of the actual relation between what we see of the world and the world itself. We know that we are myopic. We barely see just a tiny window of the vast electromagnetic spectrum emitted by things. We do not see the atomic structure of matter, nor the curvature of space. We see a coherent world that we extrapolate from our interaction with the universe, organized in simplistic terms that our devastatingly stupid brain is capable of handling. We think of the world in terms of stones, mountains, clouds, and people, and this is “the world for us.” About the world independent of us we know a good deal, without knowing how much this good deal is.

Our thinking is prey to its own weakness, but even more so to its own grammar. It takes only a few centuries for the world to change: from devils, angels, and witches to atoms and electromagnetic waves. It takes only a few grams of mushrooms for the whole of reality to dissolve before our eyes, before reorganizing itself into a surprisingly different form. It only takes the experience of spending time with a friend who has suffered a serious schizophrenic episode, a few weeks with her struggling to communicate, to realize that delirium is a vast theatrical equipment with the capacity to stage the world, and that it is difficult to find arguments to distinguish it from those great collective deliriums of ours that are the foundations of our social and spiritual life, and of our understanding of the world. Aside, perhaps, from solitude—and the fragility of those who detach themselves from the commonplace order of things . . .¹³⁰ The vision of reality and the collective delirium that we have organized has evolved and has turned out to have worked reasonably well in getting us to this point. The instruments that we have found for dealing with it and attending to it have been many, and reason has revealed itself to be among the best of these. It is precious.

But it is only an instrument, a pincer. We use it to handle a substance that is made of fire and ice: something that we experience as living and burning emotions. These are the substances of which we are made. They propel us and they drag us back, and we cloak them with fine words. They compel us to act. And something of them always escapes from the order of our discourses, since we know that, in the end, every attempt to impose order leaves something outside the frame.

And it seems to me that life, this brief life, is nothing other than this: the incessant cry of these emotions that drive us, that we sometimes attempt to channel in the name of a god, a political faith, in a ritual that reassures us that, fundamentally, everything is in order, in a great and boundless love—and the cry is beautiful. Sometimes it is a cry of pain. Sometimes it is a song.

And song, as Augustine observed, is the awareness of time. It is time. It is the hymn of the Vedas that is itself the flowering of time.¹³¹ In the Benedictus of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, the song of the violin is pure beauty, pure desperation, pure joy. We are suspended, holding our breath, feeling mysteriously that this must be the source of meaning. That this is the source of time.

Then the song fades and ceases. “The silver thread is broken, the golden bowl is shattered, the amphora at the fountain breaks, the bucket falls into the well, the earth returns to dust.”¹³² And it is fine like this. We can close our eyes, rest. This all seems fair and beautiful to me. This is time.