Man, writes Loren Eiseley, is the Cosmic Orphan. He is the only
creature in the universe who asks, "Why?" Other animals have instincts
to guide them, but man has leamed to ask questions. "Who am I?" man
asks. "Why am I here? Where am I going?" Since the Enlightenment, when
he threw off the shackles of religion, man has tried to answer these
questions without reference to God. But the answers that came back were
not exhilarating, but dark and terrible. "You are the accidental
by-product of nature, a result of matter plus time plus chance. There is
no reason for your existence. All you face is death."
Modern man thought that when he had gotten rid of God, he had freed
himself from all that repressed and stifled him. Instead, he discovered
that in killing God, he had also killed himself. For if there is no God,
then man's life becomes absurd.
If God does not exist, then both man and the universe are inevitably
doomed to death. Man, like all biological organisms, must die. With no
hope of immortality, man's life leads only to the grave. His life is but
a spark in the infinite blackness, a spark that appears, flickers, and
dies forever. Therefore, everyone must come face to face with what
theologian Paul Tillich has called "the threat of non-being." For though
I know now that I exist, that I am alive, I also know that someday I
will no longer exist, that I will no longer be, that I will die. This
thought is staggering and threatening: to think that the person I call
"myself" will cease to exist, that I will be no more!
I remember vividly the first time my father told me that someday I
would die. Somehow as a child the thought had just never occurred to me.
When he told me, I was filled with fear and unbearable sadness. And
though he tried repeatedly to reassure me that this was a long way off,
that did not seem to matter. Whether sooner or later, the undeniable
fact was that I would die and be no more, and the thought overwhelmed
me. Eventually, like all of us, I grew to simply accept the fact. We all
learn to live with the inevitable. But the child's insight remains
true. As the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre observed, several
hours or several years make no difference once you have lost eternity.
Whether it comes sooner or later, the prospect of death and the threat
of non-being is a terrible horror. But I met a student once who did not
feel this threat. He said he had been raised on the farm and was used to
seeing the animals being born and dying. Death was for him simply
natural—a part of life, so to speak. I was puzzled by how different our
two perspectives on death were and found it difficult to understand why
he did not feel the threat of non-being. Years later, I think I found my
answer in reading Sartre. Sartre observed that death is not threatening
so long as we view it as the death of the other, from a third-person
standpoint, so to speak. It is only when we internalize it and look at
it from the first-person perspective—"my death: I am going to die"—that
the threat of non-being becomes real. As Sartre points out, many people
never assume this first-person perspective in the midst of life; one can
even look at one's own death from the third-person standpoint, as if it
were the death of another or even of an animal, as did my friend. But
the true existential significance of my death can only be appreciated
from the first-person perspective, as I realize that I am going to die
and forever cease to exist. My life is just a momentary transition out
of oblivion into oblivion.
And the universe, too, faces death. Scientists tell us that the
universe is expanding, and everything in it is growing farther and
farther apart. As it does so, it grows colder and colder, and its energy
is used up. Eventually all the stars will burn out and all matter will
collapse into dead stars and black holes. There will be no light at all;
there will be no heat; there will be no life; only the corpses of dead
stars and galaxies, ever expanding into the endless darkness and the
cold recesses of space—a universe in ruins. So not only is the life of
each individual person doomed; the entire human race is doomed. There is
no escape. There is no hope.
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