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From Cape Times 'Review' Nov 14, 2006 ... Some familiar quotes on death
Man shuns all inquiry relating to
the land from which no traveller returns
HUMPHRIES DU RANDT
I READ a report at the time of President Francois Mitterand's illness and subsequent death that he appealed to reason when fearlessly responding to the riddle of our existence just before the decisive end by confidently proclaiming: "Now I shall know!"
This philosophical stance on man's final destiny brings to mind the research of the late Dr BF Laubscher, psychiatrist and prolific writer on this subject.
He introduced his fascinating book On Death and Dying with the challenging comment that he found it strange that, in contrast to the common-sense traveller who embarks on a journey to a foreign land and plans the trip by seeking as much information as possible, man shuns all such inquiry relating to the land from which no traveller is popularly presumed to ever return.
The attitude of fearing death which man has tried to overcome by various narcotic means such as religion, nicotine, drugs and other euphoric poisons all inevitably and willingly lead to suicide or other violent forms of death, as the poet Eugene Marais formulates it.
This pessimistic view stands in stark contrast to Kahlil Gibran's prophet who exults:
"For what is to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt in the sun? And what is it to cease breathing but to free the breath from its restless tides. .. that it may rise and expand and - seek God unencumbered. '
"Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance." .
Despite the sombre accent on death and dying as a consistent theme in the Bible; St Paul reinforced his theological belief in the after-life with the three-dimensional exactness and emotional poignancy of poetic imagery:
"... the splendour of the heavenly bodies is one thing, the splendour of the earthly, another. .. So it is with the resurrection of the dead. , What is sown in the earth as a perishable thing is raised imperishable.
"Sown in humiliation, it is raised in glory; sown in weakness, it is raised in power; sown as an animal body, is raised as a spiritual body... ."
In secular literature I single out the last stanza of Robert Louis Stevenson's Requiem as giving unique expression to man's longing for the new and mysterious adventure of death:
"This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor,home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill."
And on what grounds shall the deep and resonant "voice" in John McCrae's Flanders Fields ever become silent in permanently recording the indelible historical and poetic relationship between the meaning of life and the courageous acceptance of death:
"In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place ...
We are the Dead. Short days ago "
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields."
The vivid portrait of Alfred Lord Tennyson's dying King Arthur has remained a personal companion since my final school year when language curricula still insisted on a prescribed number of memorised verses and lines of prose as qualification for all candidates sitting for the Cape Senior Certificate.
In response to Sir Bedivere's lament that "the true old times are dead," we hear the king's final farewell:
'And slowly answer'd Arthur from the barge:
'The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
I have lived my life, and that which I have done
May He within Himself make pure! But thou,
If thou shouldst never see my face again,
Pray for my soul!
But now farewell. I am going a long way
With those thou seest - if indeed I go?
(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)
To the island-valley of Vilion? . . .
So said he, and the barge with oar and sail
Moved from the brink, like somefull-breasted swan
That fluting a wild carol ere her death,
Ruffies her pure cold plume, and takes the flood
With swarthy webs ..."
The after-life is, like death, perceived and portrayed in an almost infinite variety of anthropomorphic images.
In poetry we have many versions of man's yearning for a heaven that would be an extension and continuation of earth and its scenic and dramatic riches in contrast to the exponents of a belief that death is, in most cases fortunately, the final ending
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