“There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.”
— Simone de Beauvoir
Dead things aren’t generally known for their capacity to live. A living thing always possesses the frightening potential to become dead, but the inverse potential is nowhere to be found in a thing already dead. More than this grievous imbalance, a living thing not only can but must always eventually become dead. Perhaps this is partly why death has been said in so many cultures to be under the earth. Death certainly seems to be under it all, slithering like the river Styx beneath the bedrock of the world touched by daylight, suggested constantly by the invariable pull of gravity. All things fall, unless they are alive to stand. Death is the “resting state,” like sleep, a negation of the energy required to resist it. Life is never guaranteed, while death is.
Of all the truth in the world that is lost on our feeble powers of perception, this fact rather intrudes upon our senses. It barbs the whole of the mind’s life. Not only must a living organism strive with its might against the entangling talons of death, but man’s very perception can only stave off its hold for so long. Death demands our attention loudly and forcefully, yet treats equally the timid soul that will not answer and the intrepid one that meets its gaze. Neither cowardice nor valiance can save.
Solomon’s gift of wisdom, for all its myriad potential, largely became an instrument of interaction with this problem. Wisdom is so like a lens that brings death so close to the eyes that nothing else remains visible. It shows us the river Styx running between the islands of things, death itself industriously, acidically suffusing the fabric of being. Wisdom forced the wise king to contend with death, prophetically flung his consciousness so far into the future that he saw the black sheet of the firmament behind the stars — a world under the earth, where the sun is forgotten and the dust has settled so long in silence that no air remains between each particle. The question is not whether or not a thing will disintegrate and join the thronging hoard of ash at the bottom, but when.
Scientists and those who fancy themselves such call it “the heat death of the universe.” Even physics, the nature of material existence itself, suggests the inevitability of an anticlimactic end. As surely as a stone rolls down the hill which it can never again climb, as surely as a candle burns down to the brass and never rises up, as surely as the stars themselves grow dim with the eons, man grows old and can never be young again. His vivacity enters him as it is yet leaving another, the torch of life passed on by parents whose days only grow shorter. As fire moves over a log, its growth only perpetuates the consumption of its own fuel. Everything burns out.
Not only this, but suffering dogs every one while he does live. Life, even while it persists, does not escape death. Little doses of death, little intrusions like chinks in the armor of happiness, known variously as pain, grief, loss, and any other mask it wears are tasted in between each of life’s sweet portions. The bitterness of it follows the saccharinity of life with interminable affinity. Happiness is always temporary, but the aftertaste of sorrow lingers till death arrives in full. In this, again, death is so much surer than life. Pain is a certainty and comfort a luxury.
This compound problem of death and suffering festers at the root of all conscious experience. Every human science, philosophy, institution and invention reckons with the unconquerable reality that death and suffering are equal parts inevitable and undesirable. No matter how great our disdain for death may grow, it remains a nemesis that never wanes. There is no other enemy against which mankind expends such effort to no effect.
The difficulty is so pervasive that life becomes impossible to understand except by relation, as resistance to death. Every breath becomes an act of rebellion, however pitiful, every movement is aimed at evading the two-headed dragon whose shadow is so deep that it has appropriated a dimension akin to reality. It usurps the solidity of existence and exalts to the same station an infernal void. Never in any other place has such tyranny been perpetrated against the air itself.
And yet, the injustice of it is necessarily suggestive of some other state of affairs. Suffering is always, in its true form, against the will, and yet to suffer is to believe that things could be otherwise. It is to will against the pain toward something invisible. To suffer is to lay hold of faith in an alternative, a resolute belief that, as though possible, the suffering is negotiable, evitable. As vehemently as death, “Life insists on itself” as if it might win, despite all evidence contrarywise. Hunger suggests food, thirst suggests water, loneliness suggests companionship. Something is suggested by that deepest sense of despair, of dread, of pain not in its taunting manifestations but all pain as such. The dread of death suggests life. Want itself suggests fulfillment.
This faith is perhaps, more than anything, the absolute of death. The irony of it, its leering mockery, is the crippling blow. The soul is tantalized by the knowledge of something beyond death that it cannot name. It is shocked by death into believing beyond the black veil that encompasses the world, but this general trajectory of hope cannot coalesce unto a knowable object. Like vapor swirling in the air, it lacks an anchor against which to lodge itself in order to become something. The world presented to the senses berates them with death’s lurking shadow, so the soul flees as it can to a world beyond the senses. But what is such a world? It needs not know in order to desire it, but it has no knowledge of how to attain it.
The Buddhists who insist that their regimented practice will align them with the impersonal infinite, bringing them to new life after dissolution — they die. The pagans who concocted vast and varied sciences of the afterlife and its navigation — they die. The nihilists who insist that indeed nothing but the silence, stillness and impenetrable blackness of non-existence follow death, that there is in life nothing other than death — they die. The transhumanists who believe the ingenuity of man will one day, even soon, surpass the strength of death’s bonds — they die.
If God became a man, would He die, too? Worse yet, He would necessarily, being God, die unjustly. The injustice of death against man would evaporate in the face of God’s death. There is no greater horror than to know that this hypothetical was not only realized, but that it came about at the hands of the men who have for all time fought that same enemy. The radiant Pearl beyond the dark firmament was at last uncovered, the agglomerated hopes of all who dared to hope clinging to his beaming garments, and the same hopeful, in their dread of death, inflicted it upon the only one immune to it. If God became a man, we would kill Him. And we did.
There is a root planted deeper than death, the black seed of hell from which death, suffering, and the whole hydra of torment springs. The injustice of death doesn’t spring from without man, but from man. What we perennially suffer is the work of our own hands. Death is the most pernicious sort of enemy: the kind we invited.
For the wages of sin is death…
Being Kindled 
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