Memento Mori: On Life, Death, and Love

This attitude is another expression going back into antiquity, a Roman restatement of the Greek “gnothi seauton:”  “Memento mori”—“Remember you will die.”  A conquering Roman general, as he was paraded through the city, at the height of his glory, was given a servant who whispered in his ear, “Memento mori, memento  mori, memento…”  You will die, you will die, you are but a man, for all your worldly fame and power, you are no god; you are limited; remember who you are; do not overstep yourself or waste your time at unseemly pursuits; you are no god, but a man, and you will as surely die as any other.

Memento mori; Carpe diem: A good twin dose of sober reality and command to stop spending one’s life in what the great Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset once called ”the abattoir of lost moments.”   Put things in order according to their genuine value – for things have a genuine value, something more than the idolatrous falsehoods assigned by the masses to allow them the luxury of unconsciousness and automatic responses.

The people sing the praises of love, but how much time do they spend in its service compared to making money or practicing politics?  Our lives are nothing more than what we do, and if we spend more of our lives at one thing than another, this shows what it is we truly value; we define ourselves in our actions, we spell out exactly where it is and who it is we wish Death to find us.  More moments have been bled out over politics than any activity of the soul, any virtue; and love – the real and terrible thing that demands our very life’s blood to exist as anything more than a shadow and a ghost – is praised in the mouth all the day, but rarely with more, and even more rarely with consistency.

Is politics important?  It is necessary.  But my beloved is of infinite value, and at the same moment, is fleeting.  Nations and the affairs of the world will outlast me – and because of that, are only of relative importance.  My beloved, like myself, is here but a second, and then neither of us will be remembered on the earth.  But while we are here together, we are our own world, our own universe exploding into bright beauty. 

Soldiers with weaponry dedicated to the defense of countries abound.  Lovers whose every action subordinates all else to their beloved are the bluest of diamonds.  Soldiers are necessary.  Lovers and their beloveds are what give all else value – what point are soldiers and governments without lovers?  Such is my peculiar faith, something that goes one step beyond philosophy and pure rationality.

“There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night,” says Camus in “The Myth of Sisyphus.”  “The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing…, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go.  The rock is still rolling.”

Death, our inevitable, inescapable night, comes on; yet, because of death, our lives, our human lives are possible – not the lives of gods, not the lives of beings with eternities to make up their minds or refuse to do so, to play at choice as if one were as good as another.  Perhaps we will have other lives, and perhaps we will, in ages hence, as the poets say, have something better than time on our hands to play with.  But this life will never occur again and presently it is all we have and all we are. 

This moment will nevermore arise – it has already died in the writing and the reading, passed over into that abattoir of the philosopher.

“Memento mori,” generals and lovers.  Remember.