Choosing life

It's the birthday of one of my favorite poets, Donald Hall. He wrote a lot about facing death and choosing life, especially after the death of his wife and fellow poet Jane Kenyon left him to face his 80s alone. He died at 89, in 2018. He faced his (and our) mortality with verbal honesty. And he loved the Red Sox.

IT IS SENSIBLE of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not pass away. Every day millions of people pass away—in obituaries, death notices, cards of consolation, e-mails to the corpse’s friends—but people don’t die. Sometimes they rest in peace, quit this world, go the way of all flesh, depart, give up the ghost, breathe a last breath, join their dear ones in heaven, meet their Maker, ascend to a better place, succumb surrounded by family, return to the Lord, go home, cross over, or leave this world. Whatever the fatuous phrase, death usually happens peacefully (asleep) or after a courageous struggle (cancer). Sometimes women lose their husbands. (Where the hell did I put him?) Some expressions are less common in print: push up the daisies, kick the bucket, croak, buy the farm, cash out. All euphemisms conceal how we gasp and choke turning blue. Essays After Eighty [Don@dawn]

Choosing life doesn't mean lying about death and dying. 

In Environmental Ethics today we'll finish The World-Ending Fire (hope it doesn't finish us) and begin to anticipate Regeneration, Paul Hawken's audaciously subtitled summons to action: Ending the climate crisis in one generation. 

That sounds wildly optimistic at first hearing, until you reflect on the fact that if we don't stem the crisis in this decade the jig will probably be up. If we can mobilize enough of us to exert our agency, he's saying, we can then begin backing away from the precipice and making a longer-term commitment to harmonizing our form of life with all the others we're implicated with, on this rock that would as soon shake as save us. If we don't, well... 

Wendell is not especially optimistic, but neither is he in despair. The interesting question to me at the nexus of these two texts, his and Hawkens', is how to frame the terms of our obligation to the future. Of course the future doesn't exist yet, except in our imaginations. (And it's possible, as we discussed vis-a-vis Augustine and as others have suggested in connection with Einstein and relativity, that neither past nor future really exists apart from our imaginatively constructed categorical projections.) 

But that's where every living present begins to anticipate someone else's, right? In the imagination? Our present was their future, their past is our present, and so it goes. We are the fortunate heirs of people who cared about us, though they knew they'd be long gone before we were ever a glint in anyone's eye. Giving all to the present is the only tangible way anyone will ever have, at least until the Vulcans are proved wrong about the impossibility of time travel, of paying forward the regenerative care we've benefitted from. 

"If putting the future of life at the heart of everything we do is not central to our purpose and destiny, why are we here?" asks Hawken. He answers:  "Regeneration is what life has always done; we are life, and that is our focus." Worries about a future dystopia are abstract, sounding the alarm about an irresponsible, indifferent, disengaged present is concrete. And WJ's "really vital question" about what life is going to make of itself and what our world is going to be should be our most urgent present preoccupation.

In our last batch of Wendell readings, he tells us that he cares more for his household than for his town, more for his town than his county, more for county than state, and on up the chain until he makes an imaginative leap that allows him to grasp an entity larger than the present. He says he does not care more for his country than for the world, which by my lexicon includes the world to come. Getting the equation right between "doorstep and planet" is not easy, but conscientious humans will always be cognizant of the fact that life in the best-case-scenario goes on. They'll also be eager and enthusiastic to do all they can to ensure the best and forestall the worst. Meanwhile, they'll share the gains and losses of their "community economies" in the here and now. They'll choose to do what they can to level the playing field of life. 

So, that does mean "putting the future of life at the heart of everything we do" now, in that present which is the only possible sphere of real agency we've got. (If we've got any agency at all.)  Does it not? 

But have we got any agency at all? There's a question for CoPhi today, for Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza...  

I'll repeat my standard line on that: If we've not got agency, it sure is a silly spectacle-- all those old dead philosophers having tried so hard to persuade us of their views on that subject and so many others, to get us to choose to see the world and (in some instances) to love the world the way they did. It sure looks like we have a choice.

And it looks like we have a rapidly shrinking window of opportunity to do something constructive with it.

Let me give Wendell the floor once more, to remind us all to remain open to the experience of "hours when [you are] deeply happy and content," multiple existential crises notwithstanding. The Mad Farmer gets the last laugh: 

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.

Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful

though you have considered all the facts.

And, let him remind us again that environmental destruction is "not inevitable, except by our submissiveness."

Effective agents act. They don't submit. Life regenerates, and it goes on.