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.Unprepared, unwarned, childish minds in grown-up bodies, they have now become death’s plaything.They die not one, but several deaths, each one uglier than the next.When death comes, “to them, their wives, their children, their friends,” and “catches them unawares and unprepared,” says Montaigne, “then what storms of passion overwhelm them, what cries, what fury, what despair! Have you ever seen anything brought so low, anything so changed, so confused?” (Montaigne 2003: 95).This convinces Montaigne that death should be faced in a different fashion.Within a loosely Stoic framework, he designs his own approach to death, a method that is as simple as it is bold: take death by surprise, face it head-on.If it knocks on your door, do the unexpected: let it in.If it tries to scare you, don’t run away, smile back, embrace it.Should it grin at you, show it boundless courtesy.Since death is not used to such fine manners, this will certainly put it off-balance.The fragment that I use as an epigraph for this chapter illustrates Montaigne’s approach: it describes as well as performs.At the descriptive level, Montaigne’s text advances the argument that what makes us afraid of death is that we don’t know much about it.The power of death over us is paradoxical: what renders it so terrible is not some positive feature, but precisely what death is not, the unknown it evokes.Hence Montaigne’s remedy.“To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us,” he says, we should deprive it of “its strangeness,” we should “frequent it … get used to it.” At times Montaigne’s remarks almost read like a “death manifesto”: “Let us have nothing more often in mind than death.At every instant let us evoke it in our imagination under all its aspects” (Montaigne 2003: 96).*Creatures of habit and followers of beaten paths that we are, we always seek to stick with what we know best.The ultimate divide that governs our lives is not that between good and evil, or truth and untruth, but a more primitive one: the visceral distinction between familiar and unfamiliar.We conduct our dealings with the world and others, we structure our lives and invest our emotions primarily along this dividing line.“Familiar” and “unfamiliar,” “home” and “foreign,” “acceptance” and “rejection”—these are categories that structure our minds and shape our lives.The Greeks divided the world into a familiar universe where human life is grounded, oikouménē (the inhabited world), and the uncertain seas beyond the horizon, uncharted and unchartable.The basis of the oikouménē is that which is most familiar, oîkos (literally household or family).Human ontology, it might be argued, is at its core an ontology of dwelling.The way our mind embraces the world is not unlike the manner our body inhabits it.This is “our” world to the extent that we can insert ourselves comfortably and feel at ease in it.Jan Patočka expresses this insight with the help of some striking images.The entire world, he says,can be a mother’s lap, can be a warm, cordial, smiling, and protective glass globe, or there may be in it the cosmic cold with its deadening, icy breath – and both are closely linked to whether in the world and out of the world someone smiles at us and meets us responsively.(Patočka 1989: 264)Human life takes place and flourishes when we manage to insert ourselves into the world as if this were “a mother’s lap.” To live is to practice domestication; to be human is to turn the world into home and make the cosmos habitable.Things and events become intelligible as they are placed within the camp of the familiar; they make sense to the extent that we can make room for them on our side of the dividing line.If we only could to do the same thing with death, we would be living better lives!The Egyptian trickMontaigne’s point is simple, then: to make your life livable you have to make room for death in it.“That is what the Egyptians did,” he says.In the “midst of all their banquets and good cheer they would bring in a mummified corpse.” The Egyptians may have never done that, but the story’s moral is too good to let it pass: living well means not just being aware of death, but domesticating it.You have to receive it in your home, show it hospitality, give it a place at your table and take good care of it.The art of living may boil down to a science of dosage: if you let too much death into your life you can poison it, but if you don’t allow enough you can ruin it, by living it in a tasteless, insipid fashion:In the midst of joy and feasting let our refrain be one which recalls our human condition.Let us never be carried away by pleasure so strongly that we fail to recall occasionally how many are the ways in which that joy of ours is subject to death or how many are the fashions in which death threatens to snatch it away.(Montaigne 2003: 96)Montaigne believes that by allowing death to enter our existence we deprive it of its most savage element: unexpectedness.Ironically, even though death has never failed to strike, most of us are taken by surprise when it does.That’s why death domesticated is death made less unpredictable.Not that we could set up the hour of our death (that would be suicide), but we can train our flesh and soul in such a way that, should death decide to take us for a ride, we can just up and say, as if to a companion we’ve been waiting for: “Sure, let’s go!” “As far as we possibly can,” says Montaigne, “we must always have our boots on.” You are so well prepared for death that, no matter when it strikes, it can never take you by surprise.“I want Death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening” (Montaigne 2003: 98–9).Key to all this is a sense of the “right time,” which is born precisely out of a habitual domestication of death.The “right time” is not something measurable; there are no clocks to determine it.The ancient Greeks had two words for time: chrónos, which meant ordinary, quantifiable time, and kairós, which was time of a rather special kind, something that clocks could not measure and machines could not track.Everything mundane happens in chrónos, but extraordinary events—divine apparitions, for example—could only take place in kairós.The sense of a “right time”—which may well be the gift we receive from death in response to the hospitality we show her—is the closest we can get to authentic kairós in our lifetime [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]