How Coronavirus exposed our failure to reckon with death
In 1563, the French philosopher Montaigne, then aged 30, lost his best friend to the Plague. Five years later, his father died with complications brought on by kidney stones. In 1569, his younger brother was struck on the head by a ball, playing an early modern version of tennis and died within hours. The next year, his first daughter died aged just two months. Indeed, five out of his six children died before reaching adulthood. “Whenever a horse stumbles, a tile falls or a pin pricks, however slightly, let us at once chew over this thought: ‘Supposing that was death itself?’” he wrote in his essay To philosophize is to learn how to die.
Part of the joy of reading Montaigne is that his essays, revised and rewritten over several decades, are full of artful contradictions. He begins in the stern high-minded tone of a Roman Stoic: “Let us have nothing more often in mind than death… That is what the Egyptians did: in the midst of all their banquets and good cheer they would bring in a mummified corpse to serve as a warning to the guests.” If we rehearse death in our imaginations, in its maddest and most arbitrary manifestations, we might become accustomed to it, welcome it, even.
Following the death of Phillip Hughes at the age of 25 in 2014 when he was struck on the back of the neck by a bouncer, cricketers from around the world often speak of instantly recollecting his fate when they see head injuries happen on the field. Does that prepare them mentally for the possibility of a freak death? Or make it more comprehensible? We can only experience death secondhand. And there is a fine line between the terrors that spring readily from our imaginations and a justified and well-considered awareness of mortality.
A few pages later, Montaigne strikes a very different note: “I truly believe that what frightens us more than death itself are those terrifying grimaces and preparations with which we surround it – a brand new way of life: mothers, wives and children weeping; visits from people stunned and beside themselves with grief; the presence of a crowd of servants… in short, all about us is horror and terror.”
For aristocratic Romans, the manner of death cast light on the manner of the life they had lived. The poet Lucan’s final moments were for the historian Tacitus a fulfilment of his life as a great poet. Condemned to death by Nero, he chose to read an excerpt from his own poetry before opening his veins, “the story of a wounded soldier.” As Roland Barthes wryly comments: “To die, in Tacitus, is to perceive life.” Montaigne is initially attracted to this notion of an exemplary death, one that can teach us how to die, but in another essay, On Judging someone else’s death, he makes fun of Romans who sought to illustrate their suicides in glorious terms. The sculptors portray Cato “sword in hand” rather than “all covered with blood and tearing out his entrails,” he notes.
In The Times just under a month ago, Lord Sumption argued that we were over-reacting to deaths caused by coronavirus: “Today death is the great obscenity, inevitable but somehow unnatural. In the midst of life, our ancestors lived with death, an ever-present fact that they understood and accommodated.” Was death more visible in the olden days, and therefore, better understood? Death was certainly much more a feature of everyday life – although in this country we have been largely shielded by virtue of geography and good luck from the mass destructions that afflicted our closest neighbours in the twentieth century and the long disaster of the Soviet Union.
Montaigne’s decade of bad luck was fairly remarkable – but the loss of almost all of his children was commonplace. We are largely spared this great evil of the pre-modern era. We have given ourselves artificially long life through extraordinary advances in healthcare, but a significant contribution to the historic increase in average lifespan has been made by a dramatic decline in infant mortality. In Ancient Rome, if, if, you made it past your tenth birthday, you had a pretty good chance of living to a respectable age even relative to modern standards.
What Montaigne understood was that our fear of death is always liable to proliferate into the theatrical, the absurd and the over-elaborate. It is rarely said but by the standards of the flu pandemics of the past, which affected young people just as badly as the elderly, we are comparatively lucky. With tragic exceptions, the deadliness of this virus is in direct proportion to the infected subject’s normal risk of dying by other means. If you are old and frail, your odds shorten. If you are young and fit, your odds improve.
Our obsession with death has deep roots – the difference in the modern period is that we expend far more energy in populating its theatres with ever more spectacular scenes, dramatis personae and noise. In the 19th century, we built enormous graveyards in our cities. War memorials first emerged after the Boer War and continue to grow in size and complexity. Who can forget the Menin Gate once they have seen it?
TV and now the internet allowed us to experience secondhand death in unprecedented quantities and magnification. We have not freed ourselves from death, but allowed its “horror and terror” to inveigle its way into our lives. In the rich West, we are more exposed to death than at any point in human history; and less exposed to quotidian mortality than at any point in human history. We shunt our elderly and decrepit into inadequate social care where they are especially vulnerable to fast-spreading diseases. We think little of the costs of lockdown in the developing world – quite likely famine and all the despair that entails.
We are dying every day, and yet we have never come to terms with death, not in the 16th century, not in the 1st century AD. All death is secondhand except our own. And we are not there to experience it.