| Splashing toward Eternity by Tyler Volk I was wandering in the Villa Borghese, Rome's equivalent to Central Park. Having finally given up the rush from museum to museum for art's sake, I decided to just hang. A small lake crowded with rowboats called to me within the shimmering maze of greenery and Sunday throngs. I sat down at a vast party, a stranger in a strange land who began to philosophize. What comes after death? I don't know. But in my personal belief, after death comes nothing, only oblivion. Of course, many people believe otherwise. They expect an afterlife or reincarnated earthly life. They have something to look forward to (in most cases). But what about those who foresee oblivion? We face a special challenge. We must find a sense of the eternal here and now. The lakeside teemed with life. A wise and weathered grandpa with cane, and grandma bent, but elegant. A young, romantic couple against the backdrop of an erotic statue. And those happy, boisterous Italian children! A girl chased soap bubbles. A toddler boy waxed ecstatic as just a few feet away a duck dunked and flapped and splashed. An older boy twirled by, wearing a shirt that said on its back, in English, "Just Do It." In these multitudes I saw my future in the elderly, my present in the adults, and my past in the children. But then, suddenly, in a Zen-like flip of opposites, the children became my future. They would outlive me. And I was glad. They would recapitulate me -- an adult -- in the future. How good, I thought, that children are thriving in Rome. And similarly wonderful are the flourishing children in Thailand, whom I witnessed a few months before, a third of the world away but right there in my thoughts. In culmination, all the billions of survivors that would voyage life in my absence entered my awareness and gave me peace. I, childless, often strive for immortality through work, through forging in matter that which survives me. Words are one means to that end. But how ephemeral are such products. The day before I visited the vast extent of ruins where Augustus Caesar once lived, walked, thought, commanded and loved. The formerly great dining hall was now reduced to a few patches of original floor tiles, covered with plastic by the archeologists to preserve them. Everywhere entropy had pretty much won. Half-buried blocks of stone were strewn here and there, literally the past poking up into the present. Physical products are not immortal. It is much better to search for a feeling of immortality through the presence of other people. Sitting by the Villa Borghese lake, I felt the similarity between the sense of justice in myself and that in others. Likewise with caring, struggles, the desire for transcendence, the capability for delight. "I" as a unique package of human attributes might not carry on after death, but these attributes go forth into the future in others, in new bundles. When Basho, the 17th century Japanese poet, was ill and likely in great pain a few days before his death, he wrote the following haiku. The season in it refers to the poet's personal season of final decay: Autumn deepens. My neighbor-- What does he do? Is Basho frantic at his impending fate? Not at all. He carries on with a concern for others and thus lives through their perpetuation. He is not isolated but extended. Grasp out to life now. Just do it. Be confident that after death others will grasp and "do it," too. The Italian toddler thrills in watching the duck much as I must have when my parents took me to lakes in Pennsylvania on Sunday afternoons. And such enjoyment will be repeated for ages to come. Even the splashing duck offers a vision of the immortal. It bathes like we do. And ducks will continue to splash. We die, but splashing goes on. Through ducks and children watching ducks we splash our way to eternity. Tyler Volk is a professor of biology at New York University, with a specialty in the global environment and a passion for integrating all of reality. He is the author of several books, including the just-published "What is Death?: A Scientist Looks at the Cycle of Life." E-mail him at tyler.volk@nyu.edu Copyright (c) 2002 Tyler Volk |
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