Tag Archives: heaven

John Updike: Is It Selfish to Want an Afterlife?

26 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Biography

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John Updike 2

“Do I really want it, this self, these scattered fingerprints on the air, to persist forever, to outlast the atomic universe?

Those who scoff at the Christian hope of an afterlife have on their side not only a mass of biological evidence knitting the self-conscious mind tight to the perishing body but a certain moral superiority as well: isn’t it terribly, well, selfish, and grotesquely egocentric, to hope for more than our animal walk in the sun, from eager blind infancy through the productive and procreative years into a senescence that, by the laws of biological instinct as well as by the premeditated precepts of stoic virtue, will submit to eternal sleep gratefully? Where, indeed, in the vast spaces disclosed by modern astronomy, would our disembodied spirit go, and, once there, what would it do?

In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as window on the world that we can’t bear to think of shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent screams at the thought of future aeons – at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me.

The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience. Though some believers may think of the afterlife as a place of retribution, where lives of poverty, distress, and illness will be compensated for, and where renunciations will be rewarded – where the last shall be first, in other words, and those that hunger and thirst shall be filled – the basic desire, as Unamuno says in his Tragic Sense of Life, is not for some otherworld but for this world, for life more or less as we know it to go on forever: ‘The immortality that we crave is a phenomenal immortality – it is the continuation of this present life.'”

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John Updike, writing in the best book I’ve read this year, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs.

To truly get the entire heft of his argument, it’s essential that you read all of this chapter, which closes Self-Consciousness on a note of such extra perception, depth, and clarity that you wish John Updike had lived a dozen lives to write memoirs about. These paragraphs, which deserve an attentive reread, tie into the remarks from King below. At bottom, both men emphasize a shift in perspective; the truly unselfish desire to live on is like the desire to help another – each requires that fundamental shift in perspective, from thinking first about “I” to thinking about “thou”.

Publicity photo of author John Updike

Hemingway’s First Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald

20 Friday Sep 2013

Posted by in Literature

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Ernest Hemingway

Burguete, Naverre, Spain.
July 1 [1925] –

Dear Scott –

We are going in to Pamplona tomorrow. Been trout fishing here. How are you? And how is Zelda?

I am feeling better than I’ve ever felt — haven’t drunk any thing but wine since I left Paris. God it has been wonderful country. But you hate country. All right omit description of country. I wonder what your idea of heaven would be — A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists. All powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.

To me a heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on 9 different floors and one house would be fitted up with special copies of the Dial printed on soft tissue and kept in the toilets on every floor and in the other house we would use the American Mercury and the New Republic. Then there would be a fine church like in Pamplona where I could go and be confessed on the way from one house to the other and I would get on my horse and ride out with my son to my bull ranch named Hacienda Hadley and toss coins to all my illegitimate children that lined the road. I would write out at the Hacienda and send my son in to lock the chastity belts onto my mistresses because someone had just galloped up with the news that a notorious monogamist named Fitzgerald had been seen riding toward the town at the head of a company of strolling drinkers.

Well anyway were going into town tomorrow early in the morning. Write me at the /

Hotel Quintana
Pamplona
Spain

Or don’t you like to write letters. I do because it’s such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you’ve done something.

So long and love to Zelda from us both –

Yours,
Ernest

__________

A letter from Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald sent on July 1st, 1925. You’ll find it and other gems from their correspondence in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 2, 1923-1925.

The journey Hemingway was making, to the Fiesta de San Fermin at Pamplona, would provide the semi-autobiographical basis of The Sun Also Rises.

The two men had met at the Dingo Bar in Paris in May of that year, yet already in this letter we see Hemingway’s mixture of affection and condescension toward Fitzgerald. The truth, which Fitzgerald undoubtedly knew (though perhaps not yet), was that Zelda and Hemingway had a reciprocal distaste for one another; they did not, and never could, get along.

She thought he was a “materialistic mystic,” “a professional he-man,” and “a pansy with hair on his chest.” He thought she was debauched and psychotic alcoholic, a corrosive influence who purposefully interfered with Scott’s writing by spiking his anxiety and sapping his creative energy. Both seem to have been partially correct, though each failed to see their own relative flaws, most likely because they each coveted Scott’s attention. Zelda did distract Scott from his writing: in his journal he described June and July of 1925 as, “1000 parties and no work.” And Hemingway did often overplay the masculine card: perhaps he was always conscientious of the fact that he could never be more butch than Gertrude Stein.

The tension between Zelda and Hemingway is amusingly contextualized in Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris.

Below: Hemingway in Zaragoza, Spain. In the top pictures he chats with Spanish matador Antonio Ordonez before a bullfight, and takes in the fight with his friend A.E. Hotchner. In the bottom pictures he is home on the couch, then feeding his cat, Cristobal Colon, one of six he had at the time.

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway;Antonio Ordonez

Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

It All Adds Up to Happiness… Doesn’t It?

22 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by in Philosophy, Psychology, Religion

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Ireland“Bumper stickers and fridge magnets remind us that Life Is Not a Rehearsal. We encourage one another toward the secular modern heaven of self-fulfillment: the development of the personality, the relationships which help define us, the status-giving job, the material goods, the ownership of property, the foreign holidays, the acquisition of savings, the accumulation of sexual exploits, the visits to the gym, the consumption of culture. It all adds up to happiness, doesn’t it — doesn’t it? This is our chosen myth.

But if life is viewed as a rehearsal, or a preparation, or an anteroom, or whichever metaphor we choose, but at any rate as something contingent, something dependent on a greater reality elsewhere, then it becomes at the same time less valuable and more serious. Those parts of the world where religion has drained away and there is a general acknowledgement that this short stretch of time is all we have, are not, on the whole, more serious places than those where heads are still jerked by the cathedral’s bell or the minaret’s muezzin. On the whole, they yield to a frenetic materialism; although the ingenious human animal is well capable of constructing civilizations where religion coexists with frenetic materialism (where the former might even be an emetic consequence of the latter): witness America.”

__________

From Julian Barnes’s book Nothing to Be Frightened Of.

It’s interesting: all of those areas purporting to lead to self-fulfillment, when considered either individually or collectively, are so alluring. Yet — and I say this without having attained anything like fruition in any one of them — I know they can’t lead to sublime, substantial happiness. I somehow am positive of that; in fact, I’m almost equally as sure they only frustrate one even more in the rabid quest to feel fulfilled.

Consider this passage from A Canticle for Leibowitzas a sort of macro-level frame for a human life that seeks ceaselessly to check all of the above boxes:

The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they became with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier to see something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle’s eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn.

The picture was taken on one of those temporarily fulfilling foreign holidays to Ireland.

The Company of Saints

30 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Religion

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Saint Patrick“Arthur Koestler expressed ‘some timid hopes for a depersonalized afterlife.’ Such a wish is unsurprising — Koestler had devoted many of his last years to parapsychology — but to me distinctly unalluring. Just as there seems little point in a religion which is merely a weekly social event (apart, of course, from the normal pleasures of a weekly social event), as opposed to one which tells you how to live, which colors and stains everything, which is serious, so I would want my afterlife, if one’s on offer, to be an improvement — preferably a substantial one — on its terrestrial predecessor. I can just about imagine slopping around half-unawares in some gooey molecular remix, but I can’t see that this has any advantage over complete extinction. Why have hopes, even timid ones, for such a state? Ah, my boy, but it’s not about what you’d prefer, it’s about what turns out to be true. The key exchange on this subject happened between Isaac Bashevis Singer and Edmund Wilson. Singer told Wilson that he believed in survival after death. Wilson said that as far as he was concerned, he didn’t want to survive, thank you very much. Singer replied, ‘If survival has been arranged, you will have no choice in the matter.’

The fury of the resurrected atheist: that would be something worth seeing. And while we’re on the subject, I think the company of saints might be distinctly interesting. Many of them led exciting lives — dodging assassins, confronting tyrants, preaching at medieval street corners, being tortured — and even the quieter ones could tell you about beekeeping, lavender-growing, Umbrian ornithology, and so on. Dom Perignon was a monk, after all. You might have been hoping for a broader social mix, but if it ‘has been arranged,’ then the saints would keep you going for longer than you might expect.”

__________

From Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes.

I stayed up most of last night reading Barnes’s highly anticipated new work Levels of Life. It’s one of the most refined, and probably the most heartbreaking book I’ve ever read. The last third is an extended essay on loss and bereavement — a meditation so heavy that the only thing keeping you from collapsing under its emotional weight is the lucidity and beauty with which it’s crafted. Barnes is an absolutely masterful writer. For my money, Ian McEwan is the only living author who can write such intricate prose.

Pick up a copy of Levels of Life.

Read other parts of Nothing:

Julian Barnes

Identity is Memory

Julian Barnes

Because the Universe is Happening to You

Julian Barnes

Mere Human Love

Julian Barnes

Nothing to Be Frightened Of

Saint JeromeBarnes on Belief and Doubt in Religious Art

A Desire No Experience Can Satisfy

11 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by in Religion

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C.S. Lewis

“The Christian says, ‘Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.’

There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of ‘Heaven’ ridiculous by saying they do not want ‘to spend eternity playing harps.’ The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a merely symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. Musical instruments are mentioned because for many people (not all) music is the thing known in the present life which most strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity. Crowns are mentioned to suggest the fact that those who are united with God in eternity share His splendour and power and joy. Gold is mentioned to suggest the timelessness of Heaven (gold does not rust) and the preciousness of it. People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.”

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From Book III, Section 10in C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.

The photograph was taken for Life Magazine in 1946, as Lewis wandered the countryside outside of his town, one of my favorite places in the world, Oxford, UK.