Memento Mori
The Earth Abides
I knew a woman who worked at the same company for forty-five years. The “VA” to be exact. She was an administrator at a Veteran’s Affair’s Hospital. We’ll call her Cathy.
Now Cathy was kind of a big deal there. A woman over numerous departments, she was always flustered. Always busy. Every time I encountered her she was either furiously pounding away on a keyboard answering emails, or else walking around briskly from floor to floor putting out fires. Always took the stairs you know. The elevators were “too slow”. She was personable and generally happy, and pictures of her family covered her desk alongside various degrees and certificates. “How’s those grandbabies!?” she’d shout merrily at someone as she hurried down the hall. “Leg feeling better?” “Hey! Saw pictures of your daughter’s wedding! Beautiful!”
People liked her. At least they seemed to.
At some point, through circumstances that weren’t entirely not my own, I lost the contract with the VA and stopped going for a few years. Unbeknownst to me, during my absence Cathy retired and so, a few years later when I got the contract back, I walked up the stairs to her office as I had so many times before, only to find it empty.
She was gone.
“Excuse me,” I said to a woman in scrubs passing by, “do you know if Cathy moved offices?”
“Who?”
“Cathy,” I said again. “The administrator.”
“I don’t know no Cathy,” she said, shaking her head. “Glen is over this department.”
Eventually I found Glen. He’d never heard of Cathy either.
In the movie Jerry Maquire there’s a three-and-a-half minute scene that tells you everything you need to know about life. It’s here, if you want to watch it. To make a long story short, Jerry is being forced out of the company he helped build because he’s recently called into question some of its ethical practices. The company is being dishonest, he claims. Putting profits ahead of people and knowingly giving their clients subpar deals to make an extra buck. As you can imagine, that doesn’t go over well with the board. Upon being fired Jerry is understandably upset and throws a mini-tirade on the office floor, scooping fish out of the fishtank and claiming he’s going to need them at his new office for the new company he’s going to start. The new good company. A company that does right by people. One that’s not so concerned about getting rich. He’ll show ‘um. He’ll show ‘um all. This might look like a moment of humiliation but actually it’s the start of something great! The birth of a new, ethical corporation that will need new ethical people to run it. “Who’s coming with me!?” he shouts, trusting to the consciences of his coworkers to spur them on in joining his rebellion.
Silence.
“Who’s coming with me!?” He shouts again.
Silence still.
Even Wendy, the one person he thought would have his back, refuses to join him. “I can’t,” she says. “I’m three months away from a raise.”
So it goes.
At last, just before Jerry walks out the door alone, one woman, Dorothy Boyd, declares that she will go with him to start their new company. Overjoyed, Jerry takes her by the arm and the pair leaves to act out the rest of a 1990s comedy-drama in which they, of course, will become romantically involved.
I love this scene. There are so many things to say about it and it reveals so many angels of reality with neat and tidy precision. We have, for example, the implication that all institutions, as they grow large, forget their original mission and become drawn solely to profits and power. We’re shown also the reality that all of us, no matter how enslaved we might feel by our jobs, actually have the ability to get up and walk out at any moment, yet choose not to. The truth that we enslave ourselves, sticking to lives we hate out of fear and sunk cost fallacies. You know, “three months away from a raise.” The scene shows us further the fact that most people, 99% of everybody, will, despite what they may say privately, at the end of the day side with power and the status quo. Why wouldn’t they? Safer that way. In those three-and-a-half minutes it’s laid bare for us how many of our relationships are written on water, subject to evaporating the moment the winds change.
Could go into all of that.
Each and every one of those topics large enough perhaps for an article all its own.
Today though, I want to focus on something else. An angle on the scene that’s perhaps a little more obscure and not as readily apparent in the dialogue.
An angle about Death.
See, just before Jerry storms out of that room, the office floor is in an incredible din. Phones are ringing. Fax machines are whirring. People are chatting and flirting at their desks and bantering over the water cooler.
And then Jerry enters the room.
Silence. Focus. All eyes on him.
In that three-and-a-half minutes Jerry feels important. Monumental even. He’s there. The man in the arena. Saying and doing things that he feels matter. Things that count.
And then he walks out, and there’s a space of about half a beat.
Beat.
Then everything’s back to normal. Right how it was. Full volume. As though he were never there.
That’s life.
We’re born, we come on the stage, and each of us, intuitively, feels like that matters. Like we’re a big deal. Like we have something important to say and do and give the world. But, the truth of course is that the world was already going before we got here. The truth is it will keep on turning like nothing ever happened, long after we’ve left. Cathy gave her life to that job and a few years after she was gone it took me a solid hour to find a single soul who even remembered her name. That’s the way of it. So it will also be with you. Do you know your grandparents’ names? Probably. Great-grandparents’? Maybe. Their parents’? Probably not. In a hundred years, save a handful of extreme outliers, every single human being now alive will be gone and the entire Earth populated by people not yet born. Mankind recycled, and you will be forgotten. Most likely, not even your descendants will know your name. The ocean will roll, and the winds will continue to whip the grass across the plain in spring, and nothing whatsoever will have been observably changed by your existence. Ash to ash. Dust to dust.
Sobering to think about.
Depressing maybe but also, liberating. You can set aside those worries. Unfurrow your brow. In the grand scheme of things and, truly, even in the moderate to mild scheme of things, you do not matter. Your choices aren’t as consequential as you suppose and, despite what Russell Crowe said in Gladiator, our actions do not, in fact, echo in eternity.
That’s not how echoes work.
Echoes, waves, ripples in a stream… all inherently diminishing things. Propagating forward only by losing their energy, being absorbed and distributed into their surroundings until they do not exist at all. Your actions, even the very large and bad ones… are easily absorbed by the cosmos.
The Earth Abides.
It’ll be okay.
The other night I sat in my bedroom and listened to coyotes howling at the moon as they’ve done for thousands of years. They will do it for thousands more. The seasons come, the seasons go, the celestial bodies continue to revolve about our heads and the sun rises every day on a world made new, forgetting entirely what came before. The River Lethe in Greek Mythology is no fairytale. It’s simply what happens. Everything forgets. The land. The people. The Cosmos. As you read this right now, 1.2 million people live in Hiroshima, the site of the first atomic bomb. They go to work, eat their dinners, make love and have arguments and heartbreaks every day, mostly without ever giving the carnage that happened there a mere eighty years ago a moment’s thought. And all that fallout. That permanent radioactive damage we all feared would result from the use of such a weapon… mostly hasn’t. The Earth has erased it. The land doesn’t remember the blast either. Trees grow. Fish swim. Birds fly in the air and eat worms out of the once charred ground.
Everything is erased by time.
Even genocides.
Medieval monks, trying to imbibe this principle more deeply, developed the habit of keeping human skulls upon their desks. Skulls of friends. Family. Maybe the skull of a mentor or a person who had raised them. When they would die the monks would have a funeral and bury them, and then, later, come revisit the grave after the decay and recover the skulls and pop them on the table. Like Hamlet speaking to the skull of Yorick, there, within those bones there had once been a brain with a memory and a soul that had given them wisdom and tutelage and love.
…
And where was it now?
Lifeless, empty calcium sitting beside a book.
Chattering finch and water-fly Are not merrier than I; Here among the flowers I lie Laughing everlastingly. No; I may not tell the best; Surely, friends, I might have guessed Death was but the good King's jest, It was hid so carefully. - G.K. Chesterton, "The Skeleton"
Maybe that’s too far.
I could see that.
Monks of this time are often accused of being morbid and maybe that’s fair. Presumably one can remember the fleetingness of life without needing to keep body parts upon your work surface. Still. If they went too far in one direction perhaps we have gone to far in the other. Our culture which hides death away behind closed doors. Which implores every child to “make an impact” and demands they “change the world.” Our society tells people that their Jerry Maguire moment is real you see. That what their saying and doing really does matter, and that, when they leave, the world won’t simply go back to business as usual.
And that’s a lie.
A lie that creates a lot of unnecessary pressure.
As Shakespeare said, the stage of the world was already set before we got here and each of us, on one level, are merely stepping into roles. Father. Son. Mother. Sister. Employer. Employed. Master. Slave. Student. Teacher. Roles which have existed for eternity and which will exist for eternity more. While we live, we fill them and play the part as best we can but ultimately there’s always someone else waiting in the wings to fill our shoes.
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts— Shakespeare, As You Like It
And maybe that’s a better way to look at it. Life. Life as a play. As something, maybe, not quite so serious. Perhaps “man suffers, only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
Enjoy your life.
It is beautiful and the stakes are not quite so high as you imagined.
The next time you are stressed or worried or afraid of making a mistake… go outside and look at the moon or the mountains, or the beach and the rolling hills. Know that it was all here before you and will be here after you have gone, and that none of it will remember you at all.
The way it should be.
Each of us destined to become as forgotten as Cathy.
The Earth drinks daily from the Lethe, and so constantly makes all things new.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
Beautiful piece.
It resonated deeply upon reading it. Funny that you have eloquently written a soulful piece upon the likes of which l have been reflecting.
Reading this relaxed me. Thanks!