It can be more effective to accomplish what you need to accomplish with the minimum effort. Watch Anthony Hopkins. He doesn’t appear to be doing anything. He is so still that you can’t see him working, but you are drawn into his character through his very stillness.
| Morgan Freeman

In the 19th century, the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard wrote, “What our age lacks is not reflection but passion.” Today, we might say that what our age lacks is stillness. With knowledge now doubling every year, the sheer pace of modern life has accelerated to the point that we may rarely slow down and take the moment required to retrieve stillness and return to the misplaced present. Air travel, ever faster microchips and computing devices, overnight delivery and near instant access to information literally at our fingertips, the knee-jerk culture of social media, and the supplanting of real community with unknown others who can become our “friends” with a click—all have created an existential cacophony, and the inherent stillness of things is lost in the shuffle.

Why is this furious acceleration of human life so important, and so detrimental? Because there is an intimate connection between pace and awareness. The faster we go, the farther we stray from the present, which isn’t fast at all, because it never goes anywhere, The present simply is. Often, in philosophical counseling sessions, the first thing I do is invite the client to slow down. Speedy client narratives invariably signal a flight from the present, usually to escape some uncomfortable or difficult truth. Put another way, speediness can be a form of denial. For some clients, the willingness simply to slow down and come back to present awareness is half the work. Here is another essential equation: The more awareness slows down, the more it expands. To achieve “cosmic consciousness,” the yogi must enter descending states of stillness in which brainwave activity slows measurably from beta to alpha, then theta and even delta, and perhaps states of yet deeper stillness that elude measurement. The more we slow down, the less we miss, the more inclusive our awareness becomes. The blur of living always for the next moment and the next and the next is brought into sharp focus, and we may feel that we’re seeing things as they are for the first time.

This is not something that the mind can grasp or appreciate except in principle. One has to experience it for oneself. Awareness is a great mystery; it permeates and surrounds us, yet we may ignore it for a lifetime. To explore this mystery, as we have said, we must slow down, recall ourselves, as it were, from the speed and distractions of modern life, and enter our native state of stillness. In this state, we become aware of awareness itself as the medium or “horizon” within which all phenomena exist in time and space. If these phenomena are thought of as musical notes making up, say, a symphony, then awareness is the stillness between the notes, the momentary pauses that pervade the instrumental piece, without which music could not exist. In other words, the musical notes ride on a medium of stillness; it is not the other way around. Stillness is fundamental, not only to music, but to the entire cosmos and every manifest thing. When we return to stillness, we return to our origins. In stillness, we come home to ourselves.

Socrates tells us that philosophy begins with wonder, and wonder is rooted in stillness. Note here that stillness is not the same as silence. We can be still without being silent and silent without being still. Rather, stillness is a unique state in which awareness, aware of itself, opens up in the living present until it recognizes itself as encompassing all that exists, as the horizon of being. The experience is characterized by a sense of expanding, and this sense of expanding is inherently joyful, as though life, having come full circle, is happy to be alive.

Practicing stillness grounds us in the living present, transforming us at the deepest levels of our being. Many benefits obtain as a result. Energetic imbalances in mind and body resolve, old emotional wounds are spontaneously healed without the need to consult the mind, the body releases its various holdings and relaxes into being-here, circumstances lose their ability to throw us off-center, and we may find work, sleep, digestion, and many other areas of life improved or enhanced. There is no situation or condition, it seems, that stillness does not improve. Even the fear of death can be mitigated by the experience of horizon awareness, within which we can sense that we are something far greater than the body. It is a consummate paradox that the happiness we may chase all our life in this or that set of worldly conditions is hiding in the stillness that abides at the center of each of us, awaiting our recognition and homecoming.

“Truth is high, but even higher is true living,” according to one spiritual teacher from the East. Nowadays, in the madhouse rush of our so-called post-truth world, with “fake news” and “alternative facts,” with social media shaping politics and trivializing what it means to communicate, and every personal reaction no matter how thoughtless or hateful or banal stealing its fifteen minutes (or 140 characters) of “fame,” we might wonder what a term such as “true living” can mean. Questions of this sort generally have been left to philosophy to ponder, the worldly being disinclined to take them seriously. During my days at university, when business majors and others would ask what I was studying, the answer typically earned wry smiles and patronizing looks. “Philosophy? What can you do with that?” Heidegger, it seemed to me, had answered this best, suggesting that we can’t do anything with philosophy, but that if we let it, perhaps philosophy can do something with us. The golden opportunity to study inspiring subjects with gifted professors seemed far too important to reduce to the business of earning a living. And then there was the more fundamental matter of how to live, of what our lives meant and could mean, of what was required to live well, to live skillfully and creatively and deliberately, so that our lives might count for something, even if only in the private reckoning of our own values. But such things were the fanciful concerns of humanities majors, and of little interest to those for whom a thinking life had no projectionable cash value.

True living must mean living in agreement with what is true, but for the ancient Greeks, what was true was inseparable from what was good and beautiful, as these three were regarded as aspects of the same eternal standard. For them, living truly involved a certain skill in practical matters, and eventually even a virtuosity in living they called phronesis. Even today, over two millennia later, this standard holds up, such that if we lived by its light, our living would be transformed into a work of art. Phronesis seeks to serve the greater good, is self-possessed, picks its battles, recognizes and cooperates with the timing of things, is not rash or reactive, moves with rather than against conditions, is humble in knowledge and willing to learn, and so on.

Sadly, the art of true living prized by the ancients appears to be a lost art. Sullied by rampant relativity and an infatuation with the subjective and the momentary promoted by personal technology and social media that borders on the narcissistic, we seem to have lost that faculty that lets us know when something is true or not, and in this, the standards of beauty and goodness have fallen from our hands, as well. We eagerly adopt, upgrade, and bring into our homes technological gadgets without taking even a moment to consider whether or not they are good for us. Convenience is allowed to trump privacy to the point that our “smart” devices seem to be smarter than we are. We engage each other less, relying instead on virtual surrogates. We get out of our chairs and off our couches less. Consequently, we move less, breathe less, experience less. If we want to know something, instead of researching and investigating it and testing it, we simply “Google” it or look it up in Wikipedia, both of which are designed to provide quick answers, not necessarily true ones. Prejudiced by algorithms that rate search returns by popularity rather than truth, goodness, or beauty, Google establishes a truthless reality as the new standard for modern life. Wikipedia entries can be posted and edited by anyone, qualified or not. In a world where everything and anything can be “true,” facts can be “alternative,” dissenting journalism can be dismissed as “fake,” and scientific and rational evidence are derided and rejected out of hand, there is no compass heading and no way to avoid the paralyzing effects of nihilism, for if everything and anything can be true, then nothing is true. We can make the truth whatever we wish it to be, and who is to refute us?

It may be hard for us to wake ourselves from the dream of relativity and subjectivism sufficiently to retrieve a sense of what the truth, apart from conflicting opinions about it, might be. And this is where the statement cited at the beginning of this piece becomes central, perhaps even saving. “Truth is high, but even higher is true living.” Plug this into the Greek equation, and a glimmer of light appears on the horizon that can guide us back to a sustainable way of being, for the qualities of true living are always beautiful and good, and in these matters, we need no one to instruct us, for the voice of the beautiful and the good, and so, of the true, lives within us. The Greeks called it the daimon, and regarded it as a divine presence placed in each person by the gods to guide him on his life’s journey.

Does anyone doubt that the qualities of courage, generosity of spirit, fairness in dealing with others, compassion, kindness, humility, and the willingness to empathize with others are good and beautiful? Will anyone, even in the age of subjectivity, seriously deny that cowardice, pettiness and selfishness, cheating or exploiting others for personal gain, mean-spiritedness, indifference to the suffering of others, vindictiveness, self-aggrandizement, hatred, and cruelty are ugly and destructive? The light on the horizon soon expands into a beacon: There is no truth in adhering to principles that hurt others. People are more important than principles, as one professor of mine told me many years ago—a truth that true living never forgets, among others.

In the Gorgias, Socrates tells us that the truth cannot be refuted. The statement is practically a definition. Put another way, the truth endures. For this reason, it—and it alone—is sustainable. If we do the philosophical math here, we find it adds up to an inescapable conclusion: We may continue living only insofar as we live truly, which is to say, in agreement with the truth. No amount of relativistic reductionism or subjective cleverness can overtake the truth for long. What is, is. Whatever sets itself against the truth—and so, inevitably, the good and the beautiful, as Lao Tze states in the Tao Te Ching, “comes to an early end.” We did not create this world or ourselves; we do not create what is true, but what is true abides, and abides in the beautiful and the good. There is, as the Greeks knew in a wisdom we would be wise to retrieve at this late hour of history, no other refuge for humankind.

One of the most remarkable things I see as a philosophical counselor is the zeal with which clients sometimes argue for their limitations. The work can run deep, so it’s not surprising that during the course of the philosophical conversation, we hit pockets of turbulence. Change can be challenging, and acknowledging a long-held contradiction or a truth denied can take more than a little courage. As a rule, the client comes to the session with sufficient willingness to move through to resolution, but not always. Sometimes, unexpectedly, a client will start defending some belief, assumption, or construct that is working against him. It can be a startling experience for the counselor, who relies on the client’s willingness to move into and through the dialectical arc to a higher vantage. One of the things that makes this sensitive is that it is the counselor’s primary responsibility to identify, call out, and deconstruct the contradictions and false opinions that lie at the root of the client’s suffering. The process is rarely head-on and always respectful. When a client’s contradiction grabs the mic and takes the session hostage, the philosophical counselor may be at a loss as to how to proceed.

Philosophical counseling is an educational rather than therapeutic process. It seeks not to treat but to illuminate. The assumptions grounding the method are that the client is 1) a free and responsible agent, 2) capable of recognizing the truth even when it is inconvenient if not daunting, and 3) both willing and able to make choices according to his or her own better knowing. It is a proven and effective method, often life-changing, due to the indubitable power of the truth to set us free, even if only through disabusing us of error. The philosophical counselor, through Socratic engagement, helps to unpack elements of the client’s belief system that are rooted either in contradiction or in some misguided belief, assumption, paradigm, conclusion, stance, or story. Almost without exception, clients demonstrate the courage and willingness needed to complete the dialectical transcendence and “break through” to a liberating re-vision of their situation, and centrally, of their participation in it. Such re-visioning implies and facilitates new choices that leave suffering behind. All of this occurs within the framework of a collaboration between counselor and client. Because the work can be deep and highly charged, however, philosophical counseling sessions leave the door ajar to some of the same dynamics that may slip in to more therapeutic models, viz., projection, transference, and projective identification. So, the client may project emotions onto the philosophical counselor, e.g., when a client harboring disowned feelings of anger experiences the counselor as angry; or may transfer feelings onto the counselor, e.g., when a client grieving the loss of a romantic partnership mistakes the counselor’s attention or empathy for romantic interest; or may projectively identify, unwittingly “placing into” the counselor some bit of unfinished business the client does not know how to resolve, e.g., when a client who refuses to call others on irresponsible behavior shows up in in session irresponsibly in order to observe how the counselor deals with it, and by observing this, to learn how to deal with it himself.

It takes a good bit of experience, intuitive alertness, and skill for the philosophical counselor to recognize when such dynamics have entered the dialogue. The best response varies, of course. The counselor whose client is projectively identifying, for example, may accept the projection and role-play a solution, which the client is then free to accept or reject. On the other hand, the more productive direction may be to point out to the client what he or she is doing, refuse the projection, and work directly on the core issue together. Transference usually resolves as the work progresses; projection almost always needs to be called out. In all cases, however, the counselor fails the client if he allows any narrative defending what needs to be deconstructed and transcended to go on for too long. The effect of a protracted client monologue on what “doesn’t work” amounts to a kind of filibustering that can run out the clock, postponing self-work and its immeasurable benefits.

In such cases, it is the philosophical counselor’s duty, at some point, to interrupt the client’s narrative, which may take on a relentless, stream-of-consciousness quality that seems all but designed to keep the counselor from getting a word in. No one likes to be interrupted, of course, least of all clients arguing for a highly charged limitation, but it is not the counselor’s job to give audience to untruth, nor to allow the client’s fear or commitment to a false or contradicted belief to use up the allotted time. It doesn’t seem to me that any counselor worthy of the title will collude with a client who, lost in immersion, seems more committed to being right than being happy.

It is useful, in general terms, to be aware that we may slip into a narrative, inner or outer, that seeks to make a case for ways of being that hold us back, deny our better understanding, and perpetuate our distress. Getting “under” such a narrative requires a profound honesty and teachability. But the fact that we can be our own worst enemy should be sobering for us all.

The first of Aristotle’s three “laws of thought,” the law of identity, tells us that “x equals x.” The second, the law of noncontradiction, tells us that “x never equals not-x.” These equations seem so obvious. one wonders why Aristotle felt the need to state them. And yet, in every philosophical counseling session, it comes down to this—to helping the client sort out “x” from “not-x,” and stop confusing or conflating them. Even when the cost of coming back to the truth is high, it is never as high as the cost of staying immersed in contradiction, false opinion, and suffering.

Deconstructing an Ugly Election

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
| John Keats, Ode On a Grecian Urn

Daphnis and Chloe by Pierre Auguste Cot

Regardless of our political, educational, economic, or philosophical differences, no doubt we can agree that there is such a thing as beauty, and that regardless of whether or not we agree that a particular thing is beautiful, there will be little disagreement about what we mean by the word. That is, we likely can agree that beauty is that quality that uplifts and stirs the soul, that it is pleasing to the senses, that it inspires, embodies balance and proportion, and so on. As an example, John Keats’s famous poem, quoted above, directs our attention to an ancient Grecian urn, whose voluptuous symmetry has withstood the punishment of centuries. Its static beauty calls us into a state of wonder about the images painted on the urn’s stony surface—a group of men pursuing a group of women, two lovers lying in a glade, some villagers on their way to an anonymous destination, leaving us with questions of whence and whither and wherefore the answers to which we can never know because the urn, both timeless and frozen in time, is mute. Yet, its beauty lays a claim on us and by doing so, offers us a profound insight into human nature possessed by the Greeks—that the only enduring truth we can know is the truth of beauty, such that in the end, what is not beautiful cannot rightly be said to be true, and to this equation the Greeks added a third quality—goodness (arete), which encompasses both excellence and virtue.

If, like the Greeks, we regard this equation today as describing three facets of one sublime reality, it doesn’t take much to do the philosophical math. What isn’t beautiful is false. What isn’t true isn’t good. Any ugly act, because it is necessarily both false and bad, will lead to bad outcomes. Beauty, in this most practical sense, isn’t limited to aesthetic evaluation. Rather, it is a light we can shine on any act, choice, or direction to illuminate it and discern its nature, a sanctuary that falsehood and disinformation cannot enter, and a compass heading for making wise decisions. Whatever honors truth, beauty, and goodness expresses the divine and invites the favor of the gods, while falsity, ugliness, and evil, as acts of hubris that defy the divine, unwittingly sow the seeds of their own destruction.

This ancient wisdom seems particularly timely here in the United Sates in the wake of a national election that it is safe to say most voters would agree was ugly, a brawl devoid of beauty in any form—generosity of spirit, civility, kindness, candor, self-possession and tasteful restraint, discourse unsullied by self-interest, respect for others, or even the most inarguable and basic standards of decency. While we have had elections before that called voters to choose the lesser of two evils, this time was different, because for both leading candidates, fundamental character was so much in doubt that nearly half the electorate stayed home on voting day, in many cases because they were unable to reconcile either choice with the dictates of conscience. Now that the debacle is over, we must wonder what the results say about the state of the soul of the nation, and many rightly fear what will follow from a contest in which beauty in both character and conduct was thrown to the dogs. What we have grounds to expect is not encouraging, for when beauty is forsaken, what is true and good has nowhere to stand.

The ancient Greeks extolled the virtue of qualities that were for many, shockingly absent during the primaries and the debates leading up to the election: prudence, temperance, and self-control (sophrosyne), lights of the “well-ordered soul” that shine in stark contrast to the dark impulsiveness of hubris, which, in willfully flouting the standards of beauty, truth, and goodness, sooner or later lead to tragic consequences under the watchful eye of the gods. There is no time off from these standards, and no exemption from their authority in human affairs. Kings and presidents and dictators are bound by them as surely as are commoners, and no victory that does not bow to them will be sustainable for long. It is a supreme tragedy that, for all the suffering that human hubris has inflicted throughout history, we insist on discounting what the Greeks knew two millennia ago. The rhetoric of hate, at the end of even the longest day, is the rhetoric of fools, and no seemingly convenient lie, no cover-up, no amount of “spin” changes the truth one whit. In the Gorgias, Socrates reminds us that the truth cannot be refuted. It is exactly for this reason that those of us committed to living life beautifully must be vigilant in our responses to the grotesque remarks shamelessly made by the candidates as though they were the most normal thing in the world, so that we are not drawn into ugliness ourselves. Rather, we must deepen our resolve to live a personal ideology that is predicated on beauty, and so, intrinsically, on what is true and good.

Voltaire writes, “It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.” The current political reality in the U.S. has yet to unfold, but already we are seeing at the highest levels of government the same rancor, divisiveness, wanton self-interest, and abdication of high thinking that debased the campaigns. It is a sober reminder for thoughtful people everywhere, for those committed to self-examination and the improvement of their character, who know that there is no greater truth than kindness and compassion for others, and who eschew belligerence and scapegoating in the awareness that ultimately, on this rare and beautiful planet we inhabit, we either all win or we all lose. For now, we may take comfort in the confidence that the pendulum of history swings only so far before it returns, and that what follows next is in the good hands of the gods, whose ways are subject to the will of no man.

We who live here in Florida recently dodged a bullet fired at us by Mother Nature. Matthew, a cat-5 hurricane that decimated poor Haiti, leaving a thousand dead, came roaring toward the Florida coast promising to unleash a cataclysm of weather after which there almost certainly would be deaths, injury, massive property damage, and widespread power outages. The governor of the state even declared, as Matthew approached, that the storm was a killer in the hope of persuading die-hards living near the ocean to evacuate. The Caribbean leading into the Atlantic and along the eastern seaboard of the U.S. is a predictable corridor for these devastating systems, so Floridians certainly are no strangers to the phenomenon, nor are we unique in this respect. Other parts of the country and the world have their own forms of exposure to the worst of the elements—earthquakes, flooding, drought, tornadoes, tsunamis, all of which demonstrate that we live at the mercy of forces far greater than we can control or even anticipate. When one of these natural disasters hits, all we can do is run for cover, hole up, wait it out, and hope for the best.

Well, that’s all we can do sanely. There is an insane alternative. We could stand outside in the murderous winds and curse Nature. We could raise our fists in protest, rail against the demons of earth and sky, even spit at them to express our frustration, helplessness, and sense of injustice in the face of such arbitrary and destructive power. Of course, spitting at a hurricane falls somewhat short of a good idea, because it amounts to spitting in one’s own face. Here, we have a metaphor that has far-reaching application in all areas of life where we find ourselves facing conditions that affect us, perhaps greatly, but about which we can do little or nothing.

The Greeks called such conditions “fate.” Nietzsche, who was well versed in the Greeks, went as far as to declare, “Amor fati”—love your fate! No mean task when you’re in your house surrounded by gale force winds, hoping some live oak won’t make an entrance through the roof. Maybe on a good day, we can accept our fate, work with it, tolerate it, meet it without resistance, which the Greeks regarded as a mark of good character. One of them, Heraclitus, states, “A man’s character is his fate,” suggesting that how we meet conditions that erupt into our lives without our permission and beyond our control actually determines what those conditions become for us. Our leverage then, lies not in the hands of fate, but in our hands. Fate may dictate what happens to us, but we get the last word. This is so important for living what the Greeks called “the good life,” that they viewed the refusal to accept one’s fate as an act of hubris before the gods, a failing of character that led ineluctably to suffering and tragedy.

Oedipus Rex, the protagonist in the play by Sophocles, is the classical embodiment of this hubris. Not knowing when to quit, he stirs up hurricanes and refuses to stop spitting at them, even when he is warned by the prophet Tiresias. As a result, the ending of the story of Oedipus is anything but a happy one. Having turned a blind eye to the prophet and the gods, unwittingly having fulfilled a fate too horrible to behold, he blinds himself physically. In this story, Sophocles is offering posterity a bit of wisdom that shows how deeply the Greeks saw into the heart of what it means to be human, to live well or badly, and the inescapable interplay of free will and fate—a timeless truth in that it is as relevant today as it was when Socrates was kicking up dust within the city wall of Athens.

Hubris is a sickness of the soul, one that shows up in the insane attempt to control what lies beyond our control, to manage what no one can manage, to dictate outcomes that are not in our hands, to go riding with saber raised into battles we cannot win. This insanity, as obvious to anyone not immersed in the Sturm und Drang of an overreaching will as would be the insanity of spitting at a hurricane, may be all but invisible to the psyche blinded by hubris.

In applying what the Greeks knew, we may benefit greatly in any situation in which we find ourselves struggling or stressed, by reminding ourselves to acknowledge what we can influence and what we can’t, what lies in our hands and what does not, what diligence requires of us and what must be left to larger forces and timings to be worked out. Accepting what we can’t change is basic sanity, something that seems to be in short supply these days. Yet the choice for sanity is there. When the winds of circumstance are blowing, shaking the rafters and threatening to tear down the house, we may find a refuge at the center of our character in relinquishing all efforts of the will and accepting things as they are for the time being. That sanity is available to us regardless of conditions, even as an eye of calm exists at the center of every hurricane, unaffected by the fury surrounding it. Adverse forces don’t last forever. When we’re already being blasted by torrential rains, spitting into the wind only makes a bad situation worse. This bit of wisdom is not limited to the weather. Sometimes the secret to getting through a tough time lies in knowing what not to do.

My friend and teaching colleague Charlie Beall was a fist of a man. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much anger in one place, or such style in managing it. Before his damaged heart finally burst at a football game—burst with pride, perhaps, as his son caught a long, touchdown pass—Charlie and I spent many hours talking about philosophy and politics and the women we loved. And we always left shaking our heads and saying “I don’t know,” with Charlie usually a few beers heavier, and both of us glad as hell that we knew each other.

The hole in Charlie’s heart left his beautiful wife Mary, his year-old son Stephen, his two other children Sandy and David, and a church full of family members and friends, including me, with a hole in our lives. At the house, after the funeral, David came over to me and gave me an uncharacteristic hug, saying, “Thanks for coming.” Then he tightened his hold suddenly and, almost in another voice, said, “Please, don’t leave,” and I sensed that this plea was really for his father, but it was too late for that, and so I held him, mute with the nothing to say that death always leaves us with.

I remember only vaguely the call from Mary telling me that Charlie was dead. I made hurried arrangements and drove to Gainesville, seized by memories and the usual guilt and regrets over not having said this or that, not having spent more time. When I got into town, Mary asked me if I would be part of the service, offer a eulogy of some sort, and of course, I said I would, knowing that Charlie was the last person in the world who would want to be eulogized. He would have found the idea humorous.

A teacher of philosophy and literature, Charlie loved Auden and Yeats, and had a special fondness for Yeats’s piercing line: “Man is in love and loves what vanishes. What more is there to say?” This verse seemed a fitting introduction to my comments about Charlie, and as I recited it, the church fell into a muffled silence almost like the silence one hears under water. I confessed that when I had met Charlie, I didn’t like him. That was back in 1973, and I was teaching an introductory course in philosophy at the Hotel Thomas campus of Santa Fe College in Gainesville. It was my first term out of university, and I was still bristling with the defensiveness that graduate study of philosophy instills. Among the texts that I had chosen for my course was Krishnamurti’s Freedom from the Known. Charlie walked into our common office and noticed the book in my hand. “What’s that?” he asked, grinning, “Freedom to Be Ignorant?” And with a smirk and dismissive wave of his hand that practically became his trademark, his conversational signature, he let me know what he thought of me and my book and my philosophy, and walked off.

A man like this is not hard to hate straightaway, and at faculty meetings after that, Charlie and I always looked at each other sideways, if we looked at all. He viewed me as one of those quasi-mystical philosophers who have a problem cooperating with the law of gravity; I saw him as cynical and complacent and belligerent, and so it went for about a year.

Then, one day, Charlie approached me. At least I think it was Charlie. The form was the same, but everything else had changed. His voice had dropped from his half-clenched teeth into his heart, and he asked if we could get together over coffee, which we did, though clearly something else was brewing; I wasn’t sure what it was, but I wanted to find out. At a local café, Charlie was soon telling me of the feelings of unrest and compromise he had teaching at Santa Fe, his past marriage, which was only legally over, and the vivisecting conflict of loving a woman who was, as Proust puts it, not his type. I listened for a couple of hours while before my eyes, a colleague changed from an adversary to a friend.

As you can imagine, Charlie was not well-liked in the department, a fact he would have found entertaining. A former soldier in Korea and dean of men at Emory, he had long ago lost his tolerance for nonsense and bureaucratic swagger, and had an irritating talent for cutting through officialese to the jugular of any issue. In Korea, under enemy fire, he crawled through a snow-covered landing zone to retrieve a box of supplies that had just been air-dropped. When he reached the box, he found that it had split open, and he could see that it was filled with Fig Newtons—frozen Fig Newtons—which he commenced to eat while tracer bullets whistled over him on their way to killing someone. This image of eating frozen Fig Newtons in a combat zone stayed with him for the rest of life, a fitting image of the banality and raucous idiocy of war, and somehow a point-blank metaphor of human existence itself.

Death had spared him in Korea, but as always, won the chess game in the end, and now it had taken him beyond the last wall, where we would share no more beer or coffee or philosophy. The church reminded me of another I had been in ten years earlier, when I played the guitar and sang at Charlie and Mary’s wedding. There was one song in particular that Charlie loved—Blackbird, from the Beatles’ White Album. I had played it then, at his wedding, and now felt that this song somehow belonged to the sad thing that had happened, that it marked the coming and going of a marriage and a life, and I arranged to borrow a guitar so I could play it for Charlie again, not knowing, of course, if the dead can hear the music of the world, but hoping they might. The lyrics arced through the soundless church like birds stalled in the air, fluttering, looking for a place to light:

Blackbird singing in the dead of night,
Take these broken wings and learn to fly.
All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night,
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see.
All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to be free.

And at the bridge:

Blackbird fly, blackbird fly,
Into the light of the dark black night.

It is a strange wall that we pass through, this dark black night, this death. Maybe it has no other side. Socrates says that it may be the greatest good that can happen to us. I don’t know. I know that one second, a person is there, and the next, gone, wrenched away by decree of a court that hears no appeal. The wall of death is always far off, at least in our assumptions, receding the way a horizon recedes as one approaches it. Oddly, this faraway death is at the same time, ever as close as a breath, a swerve on the highway, a touchdown pass. It’s only a question of which breath.

But this dying that we have to do, we don’t have to do all at once. Life gives us lots of opportunities to practice, if by dying we mean a willing walk into the unknown. Maybe this mysterious wall that we fear our whole life would reveal a little of its secret side if we questioned the obvious. What is the obvious, here? That we don’t know whether the awareness that says “I” in us survives the dissolution of the body. That we don’t know if there is another side to this dreadful wall of being. And that it is this not knowing that fills us with dread.

What do we know, then? We know that this fear of death is a fear of not living, of not being. The mind stutters trying to voice this: How can I not be? How can Charlie be no more? And, of course, there is a horror hiding in the logic here, for “I” cannot not be—it is inconceivable. But this is precisely the shudder—that death might extinguish the very “I” whose non-being is inconceivable. In the face of such considerations, logic spins into itself, the inner structures of the psyche tremble, and maybe we’d better just detour over to the refrigerator or push a button on the TV remote and switch from this whirlpool of thinking to some mind-arresting sitcom.

But is this fear of not being really about physically dying? I don’t think so. Even when, as a boy, I almost drowned in a swimming pool, I knew, somehow, knew in the moments of struggling under the water, that my death had not touched me yet. Not-being, on the other hand, is a familiar theme. Long ago, I learned how to look the other way when I felt my life rising within me, to leave my body and its emotional protests in a mad rush to meet someone else’s expectations. This loss of oneself to another, to one’s mate or an intimidating supervisor or the government or the church or the seductiveness of an advertising campaign—there is a dying here, a sneak preview of not-being. We should never make the mistake of thinking that a person isn’t dead just because he’s still walking around.

This image of the walking dead frightens me more than the specter of mourners taking their leave of my final resting place, with heads bowed and clods of cemetery soil falling from their shoes—not that I might die, but that I might not live. Here is the sting of death that you asked about, dear Paul: The grave is victorious when we bury ourselves alive in a life that is not our own, when we kill our feelings, our sorrow, and so, our joy while we are here, in the carnival prison house of time. The death we rightly fear is the death we already have died.

There is, of course, the instinctive, animal fear of physical death that surges in the cells now and again, but this fear preserves life; it doesn’t get in the way of living, which in its fullest sense, means far more than merely the state of not yet being deceased. Maybe this is in part why I didn’t feel overly sad at Charlie’s dying. I knew that he had lived, that his life had been a rodeo of living, and that in this sense, he did not die before his time. He knew that daring to live was more important than being comfortable or popular or even safe, and his life was not made easier for this, but it was made more a life. As he wrote in one of his poems, “Getting up in the morning is a death-defying act.” Few men live their poetry so courageously and so well.

Not surprising, then, that the Beatles’ song should seem such a fitting statement of Charlie’s life and death. Flying with broken wings, seeing with sunken eyes, living each day with a little death—these images show us how to affirm the fundamental contradictions of being human. Letting go of lovers we never wanted to lose, feeling our own death when we survive a friend or relative, admitting our sadness over what the world has become and the bittersweet joy of what it might yet become—these are some ways we might bow to our walls, honor the little deaths they require of us all our life. And still, we can sing, we can fly, we can be among those who die at the right time, as Charlie did. We can give ourselves to death enough to really live, rather than live cowering by a wall, living in death until death takes us.

I keep coming to this. Thirty years after my grandmother’s death, I was able, finally, to feel the loss, the sorrow, to let that blackbird fly, to let it into the church and sit there while it flapped about the room like urgent words being released from parentheses. Fitfully awake in the middle of the night, I dragged myself out of bed and over to the computer, where I typed the goodbye I had never said to her. I felt as though Mama were sitting behind me, then, smiling softly as I typed. Soon, she was joined by my other grandparents, an uncle, an aunt—the dear ones who had disappeared so many years ago, when, even then, I was too vanished to feel their vanishing. I wept while I wrote, and the tears fell onto my hands. When the feeling was spent, I found that it wasn’t really so hard to say goodbye. And as I let go, a part of me came alive that had been dead for decades.

There is a death-in-life that comes over us when we’re unwilling to let go into our grief or fear or anger, and this wall built against pain keeps out our happiness, as well. Such dying prevents our living. Edwin Markham describes this sorry state in his poem, The Man with the Hoe, which tells of someone whose life has become like that of an ox, a beast of burden, yoked to his days, merely existing:

Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?

Ironically, if we learn to die while living, our lives come alive. Only a man or woman who grasps this, who thinks in a “marrowbone,” as Yeats puts it, can eat Fig Newtons under fire in the snow.

Beyond the dreaded wall of death, then, there is no drop off the horizon as the ancients feared, and who knows?—perhaps all our journeys, as T.S. Eliot writes, bring us full circle. In the end, it may not matter. But it matters now. We don’t have to know where we’re going to get there well. And if the whole shebang ends with a whimper and a slide into eternal night, what of it? For the time being, the blackbird is not only in the church, he’s flying. In the dead of night, with sunken eyes and broken wings, surrounded by walls. He’s flying, and he’s singing.