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The lessons of mortality are difficult to master in the abstract, and statistics are nothing if not that. But when a global pandemic forces us to confront the mortality of those we hold dear, its sheer immediacy can open our eyes. We can begin to see with new clarity that life is not forever and that each day is like a gift that could run out any day.
Donne Undone
Consider the work of one of the greatest poets ever to write in the English language, John Donne. Born in London in 1571, Donne lost his father at age 4, and as a young man he led the life of a playboy. His subsequent diplomatic career “un-done” by an impolitic marriage, his wife died days after the birth of their 12th child. He eventually became Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
In 1623, Donne fell mortally ill, perhaps with typhus. From his brush with death flowed one of the world’s great meditations on the fragility and preciousness of life, his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.
The title, like Donne’s poetry, is allusive. Today his illness would land him in a hospital emergency department, but he rose up or “emerged” from it renewed and enlightened.
As he returned to life, Donne insisted that he be given a pen and paper, so that he could record the experience. Working with remarkable speed and clarity, he produced 23 devotions, each corresponding to a day of his illness.
Undoubtedly the most beloved is the 17th, which begins with the line “Now this bell, tolling softly for another, says to me, You must die.”
Mortal peril, Donne is saying, is not a lesson only for the imperiled, but for all human beings.
By so often removing death from the home and relocating it to hospitals and funeral homes, we have largely banished it from our consciousness, shielding ourselves from what it has to teach. But each death knell can be more than a grim warning. If we resonate with it, it can summon us to an understanding.
Donne Restored
From section 17 of Donne’s Devotions flow some of the most transcendent lines in the English language:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod bee washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
In a time of a pandemic, when public health officials urge people to “shelter in place,” and every face on the street seems to present a threat of contagion, Donne finds in mortality a remarkably counterintuitive lesson.
The fragility of life, far from isolating us from one another, should in fact open us up and more than ever, join us as one.
Each of us, Donne suggests, is a part of a larger whole, and what happens to even the smallest part befalls us all. Death and vulnerability to suffering are among the most essential and universal human traits, transcending all bounds of class, party, and faith. To lead fully human lives, we must embrace our involvement in humanity, which is to say, face up to our shared fragility:
Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out, and applies that gold to me if by this consideration of another’s danger, I take mine own into contemplation….
A Virus's Lessons
Affliction, says Donne, is a kind of treasure. It enables us to distinguish more clearly between what really matters and what turns out, to our surprise, to matter less than we thought. It shows us what truly makes a day worth living, and hence what is most worth striving for. And it teaches us, even in the midst of isolation, how close to one another we really are.
It is important to understand the COVID-19 threat and the steps we can take to protect those we love.
But it is equally important that we not allow a viral deluge of statistics to distract us from what encounters with death have convinced me and many of my colleagues is the most important lesson of all—that death offers us profound insights on life.
