- Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle
Even the dying don't want to die. From the time we learn to think on our own, we see a world centered on us. Take yourself out of the picture, and the world may as well cease to exist.Such self-serving bias can be comforting, adding the thinnest veneer of meaning to our otherwise meaningless lives, which, really, is no more than a mote of dust in the vast desert of human evolution—and perhaps the reason we instinctively rush for the door the moment the ground under us starts shaking.
But such moments of crisis are soon forgotten and at other times we can go to incredible lengths to deny our impending mortality. As Kierkegaard says, although we see death all around us, we continue to live in 'death-denial', refusing to inwardly accept that we, too, will die someday.
That's not for a want of reminders. The greatest works of arts—from Tolstoy's War and Peace to Edward Munch's Scream to Michelangelo's majestic Sistine Chapel frescos to blockbusters like Titanic—they all revolve on the motif of death and how people can learn to live with it. They lead us to a better understanding of death, but only in the abstract, and only insofar as it concerns the death of others. Our own mortality is a strictly no-go zone.
Long before the recent tremors we had heard horror stories about the 1934 Great Earthquake and how another whopper was overdue. But we chose to forget this inconvenient truth as Kathmandu, by degrees, was turned into a concrete jungle, the height of its soaring skyscrapers dwarfed only by the unmitigated greed of builders.
This willful amnesia is the reason no one these days talks about the Shaanxi earthquake that killed 830,000 people in China, making it the deadliest in recorded history. The most popular theory about the 1556 quake, at the time, came from a Portuguese priest, Gaspar da Cruz. In his wildly popular A Treatise of China (1569) he painted the earthquake as a divine retribution for "the sin" of "unnatural vice" (homosexuality) that was "widely practiced" by the Chinese.
If so, are Nepalis also guilty of the same unnatural vice and thereby of bringing the recent misfortune upon ourselves? Apparently not. But Israelis very well might be held culpable for our woes. At least if Rabbi Moshe Sternbuch, the head of biet din—the Israeli court with legal powers in religious matters—is to be believed. The recent earthquakes in Nepal, says the rabbi, was a "warning" to Israelis not to indulge in "the crime of incest and male to male anal sex". Otherwise, this form of "divine penalty" might next visit Israel.
Of course, we need not look that far to know how seemingly rational people are capable of fantastic sleights of mind to feel secure about their life in perpetuity.
Yesterday, I had gone shopping with my mother. We were in Chabahil where she wanted to buy some decorative threads.
The shop she had in mind turned out to be a cubbyhole at the end of a narrow passage. The surrounding walls were all cracked. In broad daylight, it was nearly pitch dark inside, the only source of illumination a flickering emergency light. If there was a big earthquake, the whole shop could literally fall over the young lady inside. She would have no escape. Yet there was not a hint of fear in her calm eyes as my mother haggled with her for the mandatory discount.
I see thousands of people like her in Ason and Indrachowk who continue to live in houses that have all but crumbled, the whole edifice held in place by no more than a pair of wooden stilts—and I wonder.
Freud thought that fear of death was in reality only a 'disguise' of our inner struggle to cope with our unresolved childhood conflicts.
So perhaps it's the constraints of the rigid Hindu society that we try to escape as we scramble for our lives after an earthquake. But if so, why, no sooner that have we run out of our homes, do we long to be back inside?
Minus Freud, the simplest explanation for this paradox is that we have no choice. For most of us our only wealth is our house and the piece land on which it stands.
Poverty and self-denial have been close cousins much before Charles Darwin left on the famous sea voyage that would revolutionize our understanding of life on earth. If you have nothing to eat for the evening, idle musings about death is a luxury you can ill afford—or precisely for that reason, you think about it all the time.
biswas.baral@gmail.com
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