Not to be Here, Not to be Anywhere

Over at the American Scene, Alan Jacobs posts a couple of posts on facing death as an atheist.

Within, he notes a curious non-chalance or even celebratory attitude of some atheists towards death.  He noted that biologist Richard Dawkins called the fear of death "illogical,"  and that fantasy author Philip Pullman wrote that some characters' deaths were like "vivid little burst of happiness [like] the bubbles in a glass of champagne."  But this is a confused metaphor: any pleasure from the champagne bubbles bursting is within the tongue of the drinker.  The bubbles are the object of the pleasure, not the subject, and this sloppy metaphor provides a way to gloss over their annihiliation with the foggy memories of past soirees.  Alternatively, such language could be used to imply the bubbles are subsumed into the greater whole of the champagne itself---the raindrops becoming part of the ocean idea--but this is pantheist, and not atheist, thought, and Pullman should be clear and honest enough to say so.

Jacobs posted a portion of a poem by a more circumspect atheist, Philip Larkin, entitled "Aubade." An excerpt:

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse

- The good not used, the love not given, time

Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never:

But at the total emptiness forever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says no rational being

Can fear a thing it cannot feel, not seeing

that this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

So, if you want to pursue atheism, you are free to do so.  Just be prepared to shudder; the reaper does not take kindly to glib snickering.