The Conduct of Life

“Forget!” answers Wisdom, if indeed with a variety of locutions aimed at softening the harsh advice. “Forget!” says Ethics in its turn. “Forward over the graves of the dead!” cried Goethe, and in chorus with him other great minds of the past.

We say that Time is the great healer; but too many good things, too many arduous achievements, are commonly credited to Time—a being after all that does not exist. No, our forgetting is not the work of Time. It is our own work. We will to forget, and we forget.

To all appearances the fact seems different. We commemorate our lost ones by gathering the reminders they have left behind, painting likenesses of them, writing biographies and eulogies, building tombs, appointing days for hallowing their memory. We do our utmost, I say. But is it really a case of “doing,” and if it be, is it not a doing in vain? Not in vain, because it is not a “doing” but an “expressing.” In all those forms and ceremonials we are simply giving voice to our own affections: we cry out to others but, before others, to ourselves to tell how great was our love for the dear one whom we shall see no longer.

And yet, all this utterance, all this expression in its multiple forms, is but a first step toward forgetfulness. In its first stage, grief is madness or something akin to madness. We surrender to impulses which, were they to endure, would carry us to actions like those of Joan the Mad. We would recall the irrevocable; we would cry out to one who cannot answer; we beg for the touch of a hand whose loving pressure we shall never feel again. We would see another glow in eyes which will never again smile upon us and which have veiled in sadness the smiles that once were there. And we feel remorse at remaining alive ourselves, as though our life somehow were a thing we had stolen. Yes, we would like to die with our dead. Who of us, alas, has not experienced such bitter thoughts in his bereavement? We are different from each other in the kind and quality of the work we do in life. But in love and in grief we are all alike. We all weep in the same way. And in the expression we give to our sorrow, in the various forms of commemoration and worship we accord our dead, we escape from our torment by making it objective, by putting it, as it were, outside ourselves.

So, in all these strivings of ours to keep the dead from really being so, we begin to encompass their real extinction within us. Nor is the result different if we set out to keep them alive in another way—by continuing the labours which they began but left unfinished. We do our best to maintain the institutions which they founded, to spread abroad the words they uttered, to bring their plans and their thoughts to fruition. But all this, after all, is a work of ours; and in process of developing it, we get farther and farther from what they did, going beyond it, actually changing it. If at one time we began to forget them by giving to our sorrow the relief that expression brings, we now forget them in a practical way by going on with their work.

So it is that in the life we live after they have gone we give a second and spiritual burial to the dear ones whose bodies we first covered with earth. A cruel thought!

And yet, as we think of it, we see that it is not cruel at all.

What we buried chat first time was not they, but something that had ceased to be they—the earthly vesture they had thrown off. In the same way, what we bury this second time is not they, but our vain imaginings in regard to them.

What would they have asked of us, these dear ones who have gone? What would we ask of the dear ones who will live on after we have gone? Would we beset them like ill-omened spectres, tormenting them with our ever-absent presence? In our lifetime we did all we could to spare them the slightest discomforts. Would we now perpetuate the most terrible and helpless anguish that human beings know?

Those who have died, we who shall one day die, wish only the welfare of those we love; and since that welfare is inseparable from the continuation of our best work, what we would have is that continuation, which is nothing else than a transformation. We are, in reality, nothing but what we do; and that is all of us that we would have immortal. Our specific individuality is an appearance labelled with a name—it is, in other words, a mere convention; it could persist only as Non-being persists, as a tremor in the void; whereas our affects and our works persist as Being persists, serenely, eternally, in the new reality which they occasion. What is this life of ours but “a hastening unto death,” death of our individuality, that is; and what is, achievement save death in our work, which is at once detached from him who does it to become something outside him and beyond?