The past couple of days were a rowdy one, so I failed to read as much as I wanted to. The truth of the matter is I was not able to read as much as I wanted to due to the mere fact that I barely had time to sit back just like I used to do. However, that does not mean that the interest in Death at Intervals decreased. On the contrary, each chapter never fails to usher in new thoughts that could be worthy of a dose of mental exercise.
Going back to where I left in the previous post, death started to distributed letters to people who’s times were nearly up. She came up with this idea in order to give time to the affected people to make up what is left of their life. She thought that this would be for the benefit of the majority, but it turned out that people were not doing what death thought them to do. Instead, people who received death’s letters became depressed hedonists.
Before going any further, I would like to somehow rectify myself for thinking of death as a man in the previous post. It was mentioned in the novel that Death had always been symbolized as a woman, but I never came across that before, if this were a fact. I don’t really know why am I saying this, but going back to death, there had been a massive manhunt for her, which was a real blind shot. As you may have figured, death was never found by the police force, although they hired experts to produce a vague figure of her using three authentic depictions of her.
The priests and counselors had a role to play in these adjustments. The endless throng of dying people put priests on a nonstop duty at the confessionals. However good they were in doing their job of consoling people who were about to die, they were not able to comfort themselves when they received their own purple letters from death.
With that, it is worth speculating if the following question: would you rather know or not know when your own time is going to expire? If yes, would you spend the remaining days of your life making the most out of it, or wallow in misery since there seems to be no point in doing so, or go on living and enjoy the day like you have never heard the news, or keep everything to yourself to prevent your family and friends from hurting? Would hope and optimism be defeated when the news of your death arrives at your doorstep? Would the very basic fact that death is informed to the dying shatter the philosophical beliefs that some of us hold true?
If this were the case, existentialism will be annihilated. The belief that one makes up what is there to life is a thus a big fallacy. With your destiny sealed, would it be any good to live up to existential thoughts and principles when the fundamentals have been crippled? If you still think so, it could perhaps be given a proper name, and you might have guessed it. It would be pseudo-existentialism.
However, that is not yet the case, as far as I know. This is an either good or bad news, and as for me, I prefer not knowing when my time would come. I still want the element of surprise in life, because without it, life would be really a monochromatic color palette.
Going back to the novel, death got accustomed to sending out around 300 letters a day to those people who were going to die in a week’s time. Much to the consternation of death, one letter was returned to her, which meant that one was challenging her authority and power. Someone was able to defy his own death, so what death did was resend the letter, but it came back. She then sent it for the third time, but that person was stubborn. He even went to the point of changing the death age recorded on death’s index cards from 49 to 50. This made death think deeply, so she checked on her files and found out that the person was indeed a he, a cellist who was living alone save for a pet dog.
Death decided to visit the cellist while he was sleeping. She took a little tour of his house, and found a decent living room, a minimalist kitchen, a music room filled with musical pieces, a cello and a piano, a wall of books, and a bed that contained the cellist. While staring at the only person who was able to break her rules, death thought about the recent turn of events deeply. The cellist and the dog both woke up from their sleep out of thirst, so they got up to their feet, went to the kitchen, and drank some water. After that, they went back to bed to resume their dreams, which were probably of each other. Again, death looked at them, almost dreamily. She even lied on the sofa across the bed, when suddenly, the dog jumped at the sofa right on her lap.
If you come to think of it, death is displaying a range of human emotions. He was becoming interested in this cellist. And again, if you come to think about it, death must be the only force that is exclusively thinking of the living. She is a god in some sense, but God is too busy looking over everything in the universe, whereas death’s only concern is us, the human beings from this tiny planet. If one is going to talk about gratitude, there should be as much of it to death as it is to God.
Since death has always mingled with humans from the start of time, then it should not be surprising that she acquires things which are thought to be exclusive to humans. But would it be appropriate to do so? Would it not interfere with the normalcy that she is maintaining? I am thinking about these things when I still haven’t decided for myself on whether death has an entity or not.
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