I am not dogmatic on the issue of an after-life or the continued existence of a human soul. I suppose it is actually a linguistic question. What do you mean by soul? In the conventional Buddhist or Christian sense, no, I don't believe. I am more inclined to believe in the old Greek idea that the dead man's spirit slowly fades away until in most cases nothing at all remains, or Homer's that the dead live on the blood of human sacrifice to their memories. Every generation my forebears who were loved and remembered after death fade imperceptibly away until no one living ever thinks of them. Yet I remember every day my father and mother and they are both alive in my mind as long as I am alive and remember them. I thank them every day for my life and remember the wonderful truths they tried to teach me. Yes, to me their souls are alive. My grandparents, I only knew two of them. A grouchy, sick old man, brilliant, bitter, honorable, unhappy, with no understanding of his family, and his diabetic, toothless crone of a wife who tried to love me, but to my shame smelled so bad that it was with the greatest forbearance that I was able to let her crush me to her shriveled breasts. The other two I never knew. And when my beloved brother and I die, I dare say none on earth will remember the Captain and Kate with love or Lucy and Hugh. I have only one grandchild, and don't expect any more. People laugh when I see her as my only gateway to immortality. When ultimately she is gone, no one will remember me at all, that I lived, and loved, and quarreled. That I thought and wrought.
Of course, some people live in memory long after they are dead. Ronsard asked his lady when she was old to take down his book and remember that he had loved her. And when I read Ronsard he is alive in my heart, though I know not one contemporaneous ancestor of mine. I am a step-grandchild of Ronsard for the time it takes to read a few lines. He is immortal. Shakespeare said the same kind of thing, as did Catullus, and Keats. When I see a Vermeer, that Dutchman comes alive and all the girls and soldiers. They will never die completely. When I see the works of Praxiteles, or Oxymandias they are more alive to me than they ever were.
Sherlock Holmes, Alleyne Edricson, and Horatio Hornblower never lived but are alive to me. Jesus is alive to me.
So yes, I believe in a kind of finite immortality, a kind of lingering after death, some kind of diffuse fading soul. But someday, the sun will expand into a diffuse glowing red giant and will toast the Earth and kill every living thing, burn every scrap of paper, melt every statue, destroy all works of man and woman too. Nothing will be left to say that our people ever lived. All will be dust, spinning quietly with no ears to hear, so eyes to see, no hearts to love through eternity until ultimately even protons decay and radiation itself degrades to its least energetic state. Perhaps we can reach the stars and spread across the universe before that inevitable fate occurs. Live hundreds of billion years before the end occurs, instead of a few. I hope so. But for most of us, there is no immortality, although the last man, circling on Spica's dying planet, is likely to mouth these words as he stares at the dying Universe. "To be, or not to be, that is the question!" |
