Cessation's Farce

A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather,
Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.--G.K. Chesterton


I did not read Christopher Hitchens' last review of Chesterton in the Atlantic, but I did read Bennet's editorial note on kindle about the processes involved in editing a polemicist who was literally breathing his last on a hospital mattress, and I had to wonder if in the modern sense of the word, terminal conditions have become a consequential folly, a paradox that the Menippean G.K. himself might have appreciated. Ebert also engaged in a form of self delusion. His optimism could not bargain with death any more than anguish does not hasten it, unless the anguished utilize accouterments; the will to die must have to be very great indeed, and the bargaining with the limits of our biology is nothing new. On his deathbed Henry James bestirred himself to consider Napoleon's delusions of grandeur (again, oddly not uncommon among homosexuals) and it is asserted that Proust revised his lost time to his last breath; J Edgar Hoover, I believe, died in office at a near miraculous time of history. Hollywood would have us believe that Charlton Heston revived Rex Harrison from his deathbed.

Is it necessarily a good thing that Westerners refuse to yield to the inevitable? Cripples face the constant threat of annihilation, and the more astute are circumspect about ontology, but not Caucasians with contemporary bourgeoisie sensibilities. I do not mean to suggest that people past 50 should not fight disease and attempt to remain relevant, only that eradicating death as a ritualized transition, giving way to a sterile clinical environment where our cadavers are rolled to the morgue, seems too much of a trade off to banality. This is more than the residue of religious nostalgia. Death needs to be respected as part of the natural process of a living ecosystem.