I think Hemingway, almost always writing about himself, might say that it’s acceptable to be writing about one’s self as long as one is an extraordinary being. And he was that, and he has boldly imposed his “Hemingway code” and its qualifying attitudes and features upon many of us.
It remains probably true that many of us who write have little in our biographies that will captivate readers. But remember, nonetheless, that It is the way in which the ordinary is described that can make it extraordinary. The endless varieties in this way of describing has served to invite authors of all types and capabilities to reach readers via their authentic expression of the human experience, even if what’s written is ungrammatical, simple, trivial, or ordinary. Human truths can be expressed via slang, obsession, vulgarity, and even tediousness. In this twenty-first century, each and any of us is encouraged to try our hand at revealing our individual truths however we can, thereby exposing more honestly our minds and hearts. I am thus made bold to tell this tale of how I have wrestled with human mortality.
Since I was five or six years old, I have been horrified by the idea of death. Raised Catholic in an Irish Catholic family, I was part of a religion that demands that we do not sin, lest we burn indescribably in the fires of Hell. (Two of the three religions of the Book, Christianity and Islam, make this same request, whereas traditional Judaism sought to appease an angry God, winning his favor during mortal existence.)
Preparing for my First Communion, I had Catholic religious instruction every Wednesday afternoon following my first-grade public school classes. Some ten of us six- and seven-year-olds were ranged in a small, tiered meeting room on the church’s grounds, and had to memorize basic catechism responses to respond to a pleasant nun’s questions, whose affectionate demeanor veiled her pedagogical goal of filling us with the terror of sin and death and Hell. The fear of Hell was balanced by the promise of salvation that was the reward of faith and sinless living.
I was born skeptical. I often questioned myself about our teaching nun’s lessons. She consistently told our wild young hearts that the consequences of our earthly behavior would be either to obey, and reach Paradise; or, to sin, and burn in Hell forever.
I wasn’t skeptical about death: my dad’s mother Mary died when I was about six, and this beloved Grandma was never seen again—anywhere—following her wake, which I was too young to attend.
Children soon learn that death comes to all living things. Pertinently, all my family’s children, as soon as they could speak, whispered every night that particular and terrifying prayer that concludes:
And if I die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
To this monstrous whisper I began adding my own small prayer requesting that I live to be one-hundred fifty; and shortly thought, if one-fifty, why not . . . two-fifty? Eventually, I was also considering that I really should pray for the longevity of the whole world’s human population, and maybe that of beloved pets as well. (My skeptical side had begun to suspect that the whole life-after-death possibility was just made-up.)
My first real adventure with disbelief in God and salvation occurred following First Communion. In the 1950s, rows of Catholics would kneel at the altar rail to receive the body of Christ, miraculously transubstantiated to taste like strange, unleavened bread called “the Host.”
The outward form of the Mass has changed since 1956, but back then, after receiving Communion, all communicants would circle back to their pews, kneel, and, eyes-closed, would place their faces in folded hands to speak with Jesus. After I received the Host, I did this, following the sluggish one-way line of people who had received the Host back to the kneeler where I knelt. Within the privacy of my very focused mind, I expected a glow, a voice, a gentle touch—something deeply amazing. But there was only the smell of my clean, moist hands and the heat of my breath.
Time passed, and in ninth grade, my religious belief was tottering on the edge of faith’s table. Then, an inspiring English teacher fired me up with his discussions of literature. I realized that reading was a bold and unrestrained source of ideas. My morbid curiosities led me to discover existentialism. I was thrilled by the boldness of Albert Camus. I read The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall, The Rebel, and other works by this brave French Algerian iconoclast. While reading The Plague, I had been impressed that Dr. Rieux, the novel’s hero, had his staunch atheism perplexed by a profound desire to believe in something that could dispel the terror and absurdity of death. But in that novel, Rieux’s stubborn hope went unanswered. He died, to be soon forgotten by the human world
In regard to existentialism, Sartre was a learned chaos! Consider the verbal density of his masterwork, Being and Nothingness! A million words to inquire into a three-word title! His ultra-voluminous essay presented only an ice-cold rejection of the possibility of God and immortality. Yes, he was my hero Camus’ friend, and they had both been active in the French resistance that struggled against the Nazis, but still, Sartre’s impenetrable language was beyond understanding for a lightweight, aborning atheist like me. I retreated into the comfy vagueness of agnosticism, and, curling up more easefully on its softer couch, I tried to close the cold—indeed, absolute zero—door of utter disbelief.
Well. Agnosticism was more acceptable. It didn’t claim to know everything. However, it seemed, and still seems to me, to arise from timid thinking. I think philosophical timidity is a common trait, and I see timidity as an unhappy feature of my own thinking. With regards to immortality, choosing maybe something persists as preferable to absolutely nothing endures was a coward’s bomb shelter, even if that choice compromised my intelligence.
During my years of high school (a Catholic high school, by the way) I continued flirting with existentialism through literature, movies, and art. I also fastened upon any idea that could be a toehold for more comforting beliefs. I frequently turned conversations to doom and gloom topics. Nothing I found brought a warm blanket to my mortal mind, but I was modest enough to realize there was always much more to consider from the workings of better brains. When I went to college, I decided to major in philosophy.
Philosophy had gone, linguistically, the way of Sartre: it had become obsessed with seeking a precision in language that made reading it like wringing my brain. I lacked the intellectual muscles for this mind-breaking task, and I was better equipped to understand things via association and image. So, I changed my major to literature.
Scholarship could still raise its spiny head to look over my shoulders and cause me to question my interpretations of life and literature. But I could at least paddle in the rich soup of literature.
Still, philosophy had put its mark on me. I now could see how often self-interest and self-protection dominated human thinking. It seemed that all the arguments for metaphysics, from Aquinas to Zoroaster, indulged more hope than precision in their thinking. I was attuned to every bit of thinking tinted with the hues of mortal inquiry. I still remember Hemingway’s rant defending Christianity in his essayistic Death in the Afternoon. He was in love with bullfighting, but less in love with fighting what seemed his own bull.
My associative tendencies of thought cause me now to address something that always raises my credibility hackles. I always react to many people’s common attribution of everything good that happens to god, and everything bad that happens to humanity, or even less verifiably, the devil. I, in my life, have survived seventy-four years despite Type 1 diabetes and small-cell lung cancer, not to mention lesser assaults upon my continuity. “It’s a miracle!” they exclaim. “Thanks be to God!” they say, nodding their heads with wide eyes.
I have to accept their goodwill and be grateful for their affirmation of my worth, but my internal credostat is screaming Thank Banting and Best! Thank Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center! Thank thousands of years of dedicated human study and dire sweat as we have eked out truths about our existence!
Regrettably, what is commonly called faith is really a form of hope, and features all the compromises to realistic thinking that hope entails. The apparent durability of the wellspring of faith and hope within us bespeaks the soul-deep need we have to answer the paradox that exists in the rope pull between our extraordinary intelligence and a fascinating but uncaring universe. We are too wonderful to be mere flashes in the endless spirals of time, yet we cannot frame a big picture that accords us, from Plato to Everyman to Shakespeare to Einstein, the status that our rare, homo-sapiens-sapientis comprehensive acuity so ardently—and clearly—deserves.
It is telling that some significant portion of us, like Sartre and Camus, take grim satisfaction in the joust between our vast potential and our commensurate struggles with endings. It is one of Shakespeare’s glories that he, whoever he was, rose above the theism of his era to sense and express the singular, terrifying strangeness of human existence that so critically frames the mind of his greatest character: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. (Much of Shakespeare and other authors is empowered by this same and most grave paradox.)
Remember Hamlet’s paean to humankind:
What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither; though by your smiling you seem to say so.
Can any interpretation of this comment of Hamlet’s support anything more strongly than an inference of existential angst, glorified by the Bard’s always-extraordinary diction?
Shakespeare lived in an age of dire religious faith, and his being more explicitly challenging to the beliefs of the Elizabethan era would likely have resulted in his execution. These seventy-two words may give us the strongest example of Shakespeare’s existential uncertainty, but his plays are filled with strong hints that the consciousness of humanity is formed by the endless and bitter paradox between faith and reality. A compendium of Shakespeare’s angst-ridden speeches may exist, and probably does, given the enormous volume of Shakespearean criticism. However, if it exists—indeed it should—I have yet to read it.
Survival is the ambition of all life, and it is the most passionate ambition of humanity. And we are, as far as we can thus far know, the crown of creation. Survival lives in an uneasy tension with understanding, but is ultimately more important: great abstract realizations are useless to the dead. Whatever the Truth may actually be, it seems necessary that faith—Faith—be sustained within us as we relentlessly seek a resolution to the absurd paradox that being human entails.
Frank Malley
Frank Malley worked 20 years as a rock/pop guitarist and 40 years as an educator. As a writer, he has published one book of poetry, Millennium Infant, and has several unpublished collections of poetry, essays, and short stories.
