{"id":503,"date":"2008-04-10T08:31:18","date_gmt":"2008-04-10T16:31:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/10\/the-problem-of-death\/"},"modified":"2008-04-13T20:02:54","modified_gmt":"2008-04-14T04:02:54","slug":"the-problem-of-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/10\/the-problem-of-death\/","title":{"rendered":"The Problem of Death"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

After I gave my talk at Sonoma State this week, I walked the Tomales Point trail <\/a> at the Point Reyes National Seashore<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There are a number of active dairy ranches on Point Reyes; the park service maintains the buildings of an abandoned farm compound called the Pierce Point Ranch, and that\u2019s where the Tomales Point trail starts.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The path is an easy, but exceedingly windy, walk \u2014 you go out and back along the northernmost spit of Point Reyes. The sandy ground was covered with yellow\/orange poppies and clumps of purple irises. Rather than pushing straight to the very tip, I veered off the path and took my time.<\/p>\n

I saw the local \u201ctule elk\u201d\u009d herd on the Tomales Bay side. And on the way back I walked on the edges of the bluffs on the Pacific Ocean side.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I love these sky\/sea\/cliff views; I can briefly forget myself and merge into the landscape. When I wasn\u2019t merged, I was fretting about POD publishing of all things, thinking about Amazon\u2019s recent greedhead move<\/a>. When I\u2019m between books, I don\u2019t have the usual kinds of things to think about. I get a little squirrely when I don\u2019t have an invented world that I\u2019m partly living in, a shell that I\u2019m growing around me all day every day.<\/p>\n

At the end of day, even though I was exhausted, I made my way to McClure\u2019s Beach, which is downhill from the Tomales Point trailhead.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The talk at Sonoma went well. I don\u2019t think we managed to tape it. For a change, I didn\u2019t use PowerPoint, and rattled on more or less extemporaneously about the ideas underlying my SF philosophy paper, \u201cEverything Is Alive.\u201d\u009d <\/a>The students and teachers seemed to like it, and asked a lot of questions. Over the years, I\u2019ve developed the skill of parrying difficult philosophical questions \u2014 if you\u2019re a philosopher you don\u2019t exactly have to refute a counterclaim, you only have to show that your own way of thinking is interesting enough to investigate.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I felt a little letdown after the talk, though. Is it that I miss teaching? No, I think it\u2019s that I no longer feel like teaching or lecturing at all. I think I\u2019m tired of explaining my ideas; that\u2019s the nice thing about being a writer \u2014 you get it down in black and white for once and for all. When I speak, I often encounter blank incomprehension, which is a little unsettling to see. Like I\u2019m from Mars. <\/p>\n


\n[Photo by David Povilaitis]<\/p>\n

But I will say that at Sonoma State, quite a few in the audience were in fact on my wavelength, especially my host John Sullins<\/a>, a former student who\u2019s now the chair of the Phil Dept, and my old pal David Povilaitis<\/a>, who illustrated my book The Fourth Dimension<\/em>. I learn a lot from the question-and-answer sessions, if nothing else, it\u2019s good exercise, not unlike fencing \u2014 which Sullins happens to teach as well!<\/p>\n

But at this point in my life, I no longer care very much if I can convince anyone or not. It\u2019s like, at this point, my increasingly far-fetched ideas are art objects I\u2019ve crafted, and it\u2019s pointless to ask if they\u2019re true. I\u2019m fond of them, and I draw some comfort from them, and I like dramatizing them in SF novels \u2014 but I don\u2019t want to put emotional energy into the task (which by now I know to be fruitless) of converting <\/em>people.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As I mentioned my novel Postsingular<\/a> at the talk, the subject of the singularity-maven Ray Kurzweil came up. There was an article in Wired <\/em><\/a>last month which discussed about Ray\u2019s obsession with living a long time. Ray actually sells pills <\/a>online! Might the phrase \u201csnake-oil salesman\u201d\u009d have any relevance here?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The problem of death is like a koan: \u201cHi, you\u2019re alive and everything is great. But you\u2019re going to die and it\u2019s all going to end. What are you going to do about that?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been thinking about philosophy and the problem of death ever since I was sixteen \u2014 what set me off at that time was that I was in a potentially lethal car crash. After nearly fifty years of grappling with the problem of death, I\u2019ve reached the point where I\u2019m okay with it \u2014 that is, it doesn\u2019t totally freak me out.<\/p>\n

I enjoy life, mind you, and I go to reasonable lengths to stay healthy and to keep myself alive. I don\u2019t want to die. But I\u2019d like to think that I\u2019ve learned to face the prospect with a certain equanimity and philosophical detachment.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The key move is to identify my \u201cself\u201d\u009d with something larger than my doomed meat body. I might, for instance, think of my \u201cself\u201d\u009d as extending into my descendents, or into the minds of my students and readers.<\/p>\n

Even more lastingly, I can identify my \u201cself\u201d\u009d with the Ultimate Being that underlies the Cosmos \u2014 whatever that is. The big \u201cI Am.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This classic rubric for this philosophical move is to describe death as follows: \u201cThe dewdrop slides into the shining sea.\u201d\u009d <\/p>\n

Letting go of an obsessive attachment to your meat body is a source of liberation. If you\u2019re totally freaked about your mortality, it makes for a weak point where the government and big business can get at you. They use the fear to control you. The subtext of the majority of ads and government propaganda is: do what we say or you\u2019ll die<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It\u2019s good to be alive today. That\u2019s all I get (today), and that\u2019s enough.<\/p>\n

Brave words, mouth noises, but they have no real bearing on the ache of nostalgia that I felt driving south along the coast in the dusk, as if driving through my life, past the south end of Point Reyes where my son had his 30th birthday party five years ago, past Stinson Beach where the family and I gathered after my mother’s death thirteen years ago, through Muir Beach where I worked on the CA Lab<\/a><\/em> software with John Walker twenty years ago…is it life’s transitory nature that makes it so painful and so sweet?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After I gave my talk at Sonoma State this week, I walked the Tomales Point trail at the Point Reyes National Seashore. There are a number of active dairy ranches on Point Reyes; the park service maintains the buildings of an abandoned farm compound called the Pierce Point Ranch, and that\u2019s where the Tomales Point […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}