Back in February when I read an article by one Oliver Sacks in the New York Times I had no idea who he was. The intro at the end told me Sacks was a "professor of neurology" and "author of many books", including the curiously titled The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. The op-ed piece was at once arresting because Sacks, like my father at the time, had recently been told that his nine-year-old cancer was eventually going to kill him, "within months".
Sacks died on August 30th. "I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude," he wrote before his death. "I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written."
If I am told I am going to die soon, will I also be able to look back at my life with such gratitude? Or will I see a litany of missed opportunities: all the places I could have been, all the folks I could have met, all the books I could have finished, and a great many worthy causes I could have taken up? I am not a very grateful person. I tend to take the people in my life for granted. But strangely, whenever I think about my life thus far, I am, like Sacks, filled with gratitude.
"I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure," Sacks wrote. I couldn't have put it better. There has never been anyone like me before; nor will there ever be. Not just that. According to Mel Robbins, the probability of you existing as you is one in 400 trillion (4×1014).
To be able to think and reason and understand, and in my own way, to be able to contribute something meaningful to the society, when I am still healthy and without physical pain, this is indeed a rare privilege.
Especially considering all the things that can go wrong with the incredibly complex human body. I am so much more, modern science tells me, than a random combination of four 'essentials': earth, water, air and fire, the constituent elements of everything in the universe according to the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles. But even science has only just begun to understand human physiology, much less work out their Kafkaesque psychological make-up.
What we know so far, for sure, is that we are all children of Darwinian evolution, each of our current features shaped over millions of years of the living organism's slow and steady adjustments to their changing environments.
I still remember being fascinated by Darwin when I first heard about the great evolutionist in high school. Growing up, Darwin was a staunch Christian, given to quoting the Bible at the drop of a hat. But the more he studied the evolution of life on earth, the more he came to doubt his religious belief. In his later life, he had dropped the idea of a 'benevolent god' altogether and would often ridicule other skeptics of evolution.
"We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe, to be governed by laws," he wrote in one of his notebooks, "but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act."
But to this day there are still billions of people, inhabiting every part of this planet, who believe human evolution is only 10,000-year-old and everything in the world that can't be explained can be left at the doorsteps of the omniscient and omnipotent God. For them the idea of death—suddenly vanishing from the face of the planet without a trace—just doesn't make sense. They want the biggest tragedy in their life to mean something to others, and to live on, in some form, in the hearts and minds of future generations.
But for an atheist like me there really is nothing beyond death, which, we are sure, is final act in our mortal combat. There are no reruns. Here I am reminded of the character of Guido Orefice in Roberto Benigni's award-winning 1997 film Life is Beautiful. While interned at a Nazi concentration camp with his son, Guido cooks up elaborate stories to make the interment seem like a 'game' for the little kid, who earns points whenever he quietly suppresses his hunger and loses points whenever he craves for his absent mother.
Ironically, most of us don't have to live through the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp to realize how lucky we are to be alive and healthy and free. Beautiful or not, life is darn interesting. Now if we could only stop complaining.
biswas.baral@gmail.com
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