then what would all your disciples think?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Whim. ‘But I’m interested in surviving to find out.’
The next day Our Beloved Whim was talking with a group of disciples in a large tent when a man suddenly appeared in their midst and, aiming a shotgun at Whim, announced loudly: ‘You claim that death isn’t something to be feared. Convince me you’re not afraid and I won’t shoot.’
Whim leapt up and ran out of the tent, leaving the man and the disciples open-mouthed in astonishment. Before anyone could say a word, Whim walked back into the tent and sat down.
The man with the shotgun, baffled, let his gun fall to the floor and waited uncertainly. The disciples, after a respectful silence, burst into long applause.
After another long silence the foremost disciple asked: ‘Teach us, O Most Beloved Whim. Why did you run away?’
‘I was afraid,’ said Whim.
‘But then why, O Master, did you return?’
‘To see if any of you guys got hurt.’
Disability is limitation. Illness is limitation. Aging is limitation. And death is the ultimate limitation. One is capable only of stinking.
So we properly seek to avoid it.
Yet about nothing are most societies more hypocritical and filled with damaging illusions than about death. All societies create rituals and expected behaviour patterns around someone’s death and expect everyone involved to follow them. In most ways we are expected to treat the death of an eighty-year-old loved one the same as that of a twenty-year-old. We are expected to treat the death of a mean alcoholic the same as that of a kindly grandmother. Society insists on the same rituals and grieving for each.
There are some people’s deaths we feel like celebrating, we’re so happy finally to be rid of them. There are other deaths that make us want to honour and celebrate the deceased for their full life and graceful death. On both those occasions any service or gathering held would be a happy occasion, but such is not what societies make easy. We are asked to go through the motions of a grief that we may not naturally feel. It is one of society’s cheap tricks always to try to get us to express and feel emotions that we may not in fact feel. Then, when we become dimly aware that we’re not feeling the appropriate emotion, society urges us to feel guilty about it.
It is at least conceivable that societies might exist that react to human death in entirely different ways than those we are mostly familiar with. Most other mammals, for example, are not particularly upset by the death of a mate or sibling; a few sniffs at the corpse and then off to look into getting some dinner. In wartime or in times of mass plagues, societies have been forced to treat the deaths of its citizens like the deaths of animals: the bodies must be dealt with quickly and that is about it. I think we can conceive of a society treating the death of an individual like the falling of a leaf: a natural event neither to be grieved nor celebrated.
Every man is a load of firewood; the question is not whether we are going to be destroyed but with what kind of fire and light we will burn.
A PARABLE OF ONE MAN’S DYING
Two men were visiting an old friend, almost seventy years old, at his home where the man was seriously ill with what the doctors diagnosed as cancer. After exchanging a few polite remarks with the old man the first friend leaned towards the bed and asked sombrely: ‘So how’s it going these days, old friend?’
‘I’m dying, Jack, that’s how it’s going,’ the old man replied pleasantly.
‘Oh, no,’ said the second friend. ‘Don’t be silly. You’ll be out swimming again in a couple of weeks.’
‘Could be,’ said the old man. ‘But right now I’m dying.’
‘Nonsense,’ said the first friend. ‘You look great.’
‘Could be,’ said the old man cheerfully. ‘But right now I’m dying.’
‘Oh, come on,’ said the second friend. ‘You look as happy as if you’d just won the lottery.’
‘Well, that’s natural enough,’ said the old man. ‘I feel pretty good.’
‘Feeling pretty good!? I thought you said you’re dying?’
‘Oh, I’m dying all right,’ replied the old man, ‘and I feel pretty good.’
‘But –’ began the first friend.
‘I find I’m enjoying dying just as much as everything else that comes along.’
‘But –’ began the second friend.
‘Bit better, matter of fact,’ concluded the old man, smiling. ‘Every day the doctor lets me have ice cream.’
Naked came I out of my mother’s womb and naked shall I return thither: the Lord Chance giveth and the Lord Chance taketh away: blessed by the name of the Lord.
– from OLD TESTAMENT (REVISED VERSION)
That I am writing The Book of the Die today is an accident. Or rather a series of accidents. That I am alive today has taken a million tiny decisions and tiny events that have permitted me to escape the hundred opportunities Death has had to remove me. Most of the times Death almost gets us, we are unaware of. We hesitate before leaving the house to finish a cup of coffee. Had we not hesitated eleven point two seconds we would have been involved in a fatal car accident.
Our evading Death, or rendezvousing with Death, begins with what might be called the First Accident: our conception. My own father was ravaged by cancer in his mid-thirties and was dead by forty. When I was conceived – how many little coincidences went into his even making love to my mother that particular night – thousands of his sperm swam up the great vaginal river and one of them arrived a millisecond before hundreds of others. Whammo! I was conceived. But did the genes in that sperm contain the tendency to cancer that was to kill my father in another nine years? Or was it one of the only 4 per cent of his sperm that was free of the gene that predisposes a human to cancer? By accident, now almost thirty years older than the age at which my father was afflicted with cancer, I still remain free.
And then there are some times when we become frighteningly aware that Death had us in his grip but for some reason let go. Thirty years ago Death had me and my entire family so firmly in his clutches that I apologized to my wife for killing her and our sons, since it was I that had led us to our obvious doom. But Accident spared us.
It began just after I’d finished writing The Dice Man and mailed it off to the English publisher who had spurred me on, after four years of dawdling, to finish it. At that time I was a poverty-stricken college professor, living on the island of Mallorca, where a colleague and I had created a study abroad programme for college students interested in art and literature. Having finished my first book, I then gaily took my lifetime savings (ten thousand dollars) and bought a sailboat to live aboard that summer and cruise the Mediterranean. The decision to buy a boat was mine, but the dice had said ‘no’ to my buying a sailboat
