In the summer of 1922, a Parisian newspaper, L’Intransigeant, invited its readers to reply to the following rather long-winded question:
‘An American scientist announces that the world will end, or at least that such a huge part of the continent will be destroyed, and in such a sudden way that death will be the certain fate of millions of people. If this prediction were confirmed, what do you think would be its effects on people between the time when they acquired the aforementioned certainty and the moment of cataclysm? Finally, as far as you’re concerned, what would you do in this last hour?
It’s a question which all of us have asked, or have been asked, at one time or another, and those of us who are old enough to have lived through the Cuba crisis of 1962, when the world stood on the brink of nuclear war, will remember that, for a few days at least, the question became more than hypothetical. Some of you will no doubt remember the rather touching early episode of the Simpsons, in which Homer, after eating a poorly filleted fugu fish in a Japanese restaurant, is told that he probably has only 24 hours to live, so he makes a badly spelled list of all the things he has to accomplish. Needless to say, he doesn’t complete any of his tasks satisfactorily, and he actually falls asleep while trying to read the Bible. When he wakes up in the morning and discovers that he’s still alive, he promptly discards the Bible, and, like the rest of us no doubt, he consigns what were vitally important activities yesterday to today’s long finger.
The responses to the question as it was asked in L’Intransigeant in 1922 were just as one might suppose. One man said that the news of impending calamity would drive people either into the nearest bedroom or the nearest church; a woman correspondent thought that people would lose all their inhibitions once their actions had ceased to carry long-term consequences; and a third person declared his intention to devote his final hours to game of bridge, tennis, or golf.
All very predictable, and some variation on these conventional responses I would have given myself until about three years ago when the doctor told me that I was terminally ill, and that I would only live for about a year. I was quite surprised by my reaction to the news, because none of the things that I had thought I might like to do in such circumstances interested me in the slightest. I didn’t want to embark on a world cruise, even though cashing in my teacher’s pension early would have allowed me to do it. I didn’t even want to fill in the gaps in my reading. I’d always thought that if I were to be presented with news of my imminent demise I would re-read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, tackle the Shakespeare plays I haven’t read, and read the complete works of Dickens, which I’d been saving for my retirement. But none of this appealed to me. I had little appetite for reading, other than Walt Whitman in small doses, and my appetite only returned when it started to become clear that the doctors had been a little hasty with their predictions.
But one of those people who responded to the question posed by the French newspaper in 1922 got it right as far as my experience was concerned. It was a man who had spent the previous fourteen years ‘lying in a bed under a pile of thinly woven woollen blankets, writing an unusually long novel without an adequate bedside lamp’. His name was Marcel Proust, and this is part of what he wrote:
‘I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies it – our life – hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly.........But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! The cataclysm doesn’t happen, (and) we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.’
(How Proust Can Change Your Life, by Alan de Botton, pp. 5)
‘Life would suddenly seem wonderful.....how beautiful it would become again!’ This – and not the frantic desire to indulge my failing appetites – exactly mirrors my experience. Watching the sunrise, experiencing the intense colours of the flowers – as if for the first time –, talking with friends, standing on the pier at Whitby with Morag, listening to the birds, all of these things and countless more took on an incredible freshness. The commonplace became thrilling; dross was transformed into gold; a new mind was born within me, a new aliveness which was overwhelmed by the beauty, the strangeness, and the mystery of even the most ordinary sight, the most humdrum experience.
The Liverpool poet, Roger McGough, expresses this simply and eloquently in his poem My Busconductor:

It doesn’t take much imagination to envisage what might have become of this man if he had been given a kidney transplant and, along with it, the prospect of another twenty or thirty years of life. On his return to work he would no doubt find that he no longer held a bus ticket as if it were a rose, but as if it were, well, a bus ticket, and the blueness of today’s sky would not appear too different from the blueness of yesterday’s. Those ‘new glasses’ that he put on when he felt that time was short would gradually be discarded. He would find himself, in Proust’s phrase, ‘back in the heart of normal life’, and his friends would congratulate him and tell him that now he could ‘get on with his life’.
That’s what happened to me. Gradually the intensity faded, the colours were dulled, experiences lost their sharpness as I took my place in the ‘real’ world once again. But I had stood for a while on the mountain top, and the real world – the world of arguments, competition, winners and losers, clashing egos, people running just because other people were running; the world of those countless distractions we seek in order to stimulate our jaded appetites – took some adjusting to. But, I did it in the end, you’ll be glad to know. I’m back, but I’m left with a memory of a different level of perception, of a different quality of life, in which things were ‘suddenly wonderful’, and a new found appreciation of the activities of those people – like mountain climbers and pot holers – who renounce the consolations of comfort and put their lives on the line. I’m fully persuaded now of the gospel dictum that only those who are prepared to lose their life will find it, that only those who are not afraid to die can really live.
All of which brings me in a rather roundabout way, to what it was that prompted me to speak on this subject today. A few weeks ago in a television interview, a man, whose name I forget, a scientist, in his forties probably, told us that in the near future it would be possible for us to live for a thousand years. ‘If I make it to 110,’ he said, ‘I’m confident that the technology will exist to keep me alive indefinitely.’ His matter-of-fact attitude, and his naive assurance that in some way this was a ‘good thing’ and we should all greet the news with joy, horrified me. ‘Does this man know what he is saying?’ I thought. ‘Has he any idea what he and his ilk are condemning us to?’ A terrifying prospect of a passionless, dull, prolongation of existence with little laughter and few tears, no heartbreak and no ecstasy, just two litres of water per day, endless vitamin tablets, and free-range chicken salads for a thousand years! And, of course, no added salt. Salt is dangerous, and everything dangerous has to be eliminated; this is an essential part of the programme.
And the programme has already begun. The daily exhortation to remove the salt from our diet is a metaphor for the blandness of life we are being encouraged to pursue – risk free, harmonious, steady, charmless, but lengthy. Desalinate your diet, desalinate your life, and you will live indefinitely, they imply. But eggs without salt, celery without salt, tomatoes without salt, are hardly worth eating, just as life without zest is hardly worth living. (Some things are not worth eating even with salt. Cucumber for one. Dr. Johnson said that cucumber should be washed thoroughly, sliced thinly, seasoned liberally - and then thrown out of the window!)
The Roman poet Catullus asked his friend Fabullus round to dinner. ‘I’m a bit strapped for cash at the moment,’ he says, ‘so if you bring some food and some wine round to my place, we can have a good time. Oh, and bring some salt, too,’ he adds. It seems like strange request until you realise that the Latin word ‘sale’ doesn’t just mean ‘salt’, it means ‘wit’, ‘sparkle’, ‘zest’. ‘Bring your sparkling wit round Fabullus, and we’ll really enjoy ourselves,’ is what Catullus is saying.
Sodium chloride flavours our food, but what (apart from wit) flavours our life? Death. Impermanence. Insecurity. Transience. William Blake knew this:

The Buddha knew it. That’s why he told his followers to meditate on death every day, exactly the opposite of the advice given to us by contemporary pundits, who would have us block it out of our awareness. But the Buddha knew what he was talking about: Live your life as if every day could be your last and you’ll transform your consciousness. It will help you to attain what the Buddhists call ‘beginner’s mind’, a mind that constantly perceives the world afresh. I don’t know many Buddhists, but none of the ones I do know seems particularly morose.
Jesus knew it. That’s why he told the parable of the man who spent his whole life accumulating goods so that he could enjoy his retirement, only to die before he was able to capitalise on his efforts. That’s why Jesus told us that we could only enter into the kingdom of God by becoming like little children, which is just another way of saying that we should sharpen our perceptions and free ourselves from the deadening weight of habit and custom. That’s why Jesus said, ‘I come not to bring peace, but a sword’ - a strange saying in the opinion of some of our conventional commentators, who think that smoothing out the wrinkles and avoiding danger are the sole objects of the spiritual life. But Jesus brings a sword because he wants to wake us up, to burst the bubble of our complacency, and goad us into life – new life, ‘eternal life’, which is not a life of endless duration, but a life of a different quality.
‘How can I bring some zest into my life?’ you may ask. Well, you can become terminally ill, fall in love, climb a mountain ......all of which bring their own problems! Or, you can, every day, without fail, find a minute or two to remind yourself how strange it is that you are alive, and that all the wondrous things and people you see about you – the things and people you are no nearer to explaining or understanding now than you were when you were an infant – are impermanent, that they may all come to an end by lunchtime, that time is short. This should help to put some sparkle back.
‘But surely, having everybody live sparkling lives is a recipe for chaos, isn’t it?’ you may be tempted to ask from your liberal, pragmatic, gradualist perspective. But isn’t unrelenting chaos precisely what we have now, with everyone feverishly, but unconsciously trying to cheat death by engaging in an endless battle of self-preservation, fruitlessly building decaying mausoleums for our egos, desperate to leave some tangible legacy to our despairing existence? But have you ever thought what our communities would be like if, to all of us who live in them, everything and everyone was ‘suddenly wonderful’? Should we ever live in a world in which everyone is fully alive, in which everyone learns to discover the world afresh everyday, finding, in Thoreau’s words, that ‘reality is fabulous’, just as Pooh Bear did in our second reading today, we just might begin to avert the disasters we are told about constantly in the news, and we just might get some intimation of what the Bible means by the Kingdom of God.

Bill Darlison
5th June, 2005 Dublin Unitarian Church