Nothing is more evident than that the decays of age must terminate in death; yet there is no man, says Tully, who does not believe that he may yet live another year; and there is none who does not, upon the same principle, hope another year for his parent or his friend: but the fallacy will be in time detected; the last year, the last day, must come. It has come, and is past. The life which made my own life pleasant is at an end, and the gates of death are shut upon my prospects.
The loss of a friend upon whom the heart was fixed, to whom every wish and endeavour tended, is a state of dreary desolation, in which the mind looks abroad impatient of itself, and finds nothing but emptiness and horrour. The blameless life, the artless tenderness, the pious simplicity, the modest resignation, the patient sickness, and the quiet death, are remembered only to add value to the loss, to aggravate regret for what cannot be amended, to deepen sorrow for what cannot be recalled.
These are the calamities by which Providence gradually disengages us from the love of life. Other evils fortitude may repel, or hope may mitigate; but irreparable privation leaves nothing to exercise resolution or flatter expectation. The dead cannot return, and nothing is left us here but languishment and grief.
Yet such is the course of nature, that whoever lives long must outlive those whom he loves and honours. Such is the condition of our present existence, that life must one time lose its associations, and every inhabitant of the earth must walk downward to the grave alone and unregarded, without any partner of his joy or grief, without any interested witness of his misfortunes or success.
Misfortune, indeed, he may yet feel; for where is the bottom of the misery of man? But what is success to him that has none to enjoy it? Happiness is not found in self-contemplation; it is perceived only when it is reflected from another.
We know little of the state of departed souls, because such knowledge is not necessary to a good life. Reason deserts us at the brink of the grave, and can give no further intelligence. Revelation is not wholly silent. "There is joy in the angels of Heaven over one sinner that repenteth;" and, surely, this joy is not incommunicable to souls disentangled from the body, and made like angels.
Let hope therefore dictate, what revelation does not confute, that the union of souls may still remain; and that we who are struggling with sin, sorrow, and infirmities, may have our part in the attention and kindness of those who have finished their course, and are now receiving their reward.
These are the great occasions which force the mind to take refuge in religion: when we have no help in ourselves, what can remain but that we look up to a higher and a greater Power? and to what hope may we not raise our eyes and hearts, when we consider that the greatest POWER is the BEST?
Surely there is no man who, thus afflicted, does not seek succour in the gospel, which has brought life and immortality to light. The precepts of Epicurus, who teaches us to endure what the laws of the universe make necessary, may silence, but not content us. The dictates of Zeno, who commands us to look with indifference on external things, may dispose us to conceal our sorrow, but cannot assuage it. Real alleviation of the loss of friends, and rational tranquillity, in the prospect of our own dissolution, can be received only from the promises of Him in whose hands are life and death, and from the assurance of another and better state, in which all tears will be wiped from the eyes, and the whole soul shall be filled with joy. Philosophy may infuse stubbornness, but Religion only can give patience.
Samuel Johnson, Idler No. 41 (January 27, 1759).
Of course we get used to a person over the decades and eventually love them more than anything else and cling to them and when we lose them it is truly as if we had lost everything. I have always thought that it was music that meant everything to me, and at times that it was philosophy, or great or greatest or the very greatest writing, or that it was simply art in general, but none of it, the whole of art or whatever, is anything compared to that one beloved person. What things we inflicted on that one beloved person, Reger said, the thousands and hundreds of thousands of pains we inflicted on this one person whom we loved more than anyone else; what torments we inflicted on that person, and yet we loved them more than anyone else, Reger said. When that person whom we loved more than anyone else is dead they leave us with a terribly guilty conscience, Reger said, with a terribly guilty conscience, with which we have to live after that person’s death and which will choke us one day, Reger said. None of those books or writings which I had collected in the course of my life and which I had brought to the Singerstrasse flat to cram full all these shelves were ultimately any use, I had been left alone by my wife and all those books and writings were ridiculous. We think we can cling to Shakespeare or to Kant, but that is a fallacy, Shakespeare and Kant and all the rest, whom during our life we built up as the so-called great ones, let us down at the very moment when we would so badly need them, Reger said, they are no solution for us and they are no consolation to us, they suddenly seem revolting and alien to us, everything which those so-called great and important figures have thought and moreover written leaves us cold, Reger said. We always think we can rely on those so-called important and great ones, whichever of them, at the crucial moment, at the crucial moment in our lives, but that is a mistake, precisely at the moment which is crucial in our lives we find ourselves left alone by all those important and great ones, by those known as immortals, they provide us with no more at such a crucial moment in our lives than the realization that even in their midst we are alone, on our own in an utterly horrible sense, Reger said.
Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters [Alte Meister: Komödie (1985)], translated by Ewald Osers (University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 142-143, lightly revised by shirtysleeves.
