Vol. 16 No. 16 · 18 August 1994
pages 7-8 | 4329 words
Closing Time
Thomas Laqueur
- How We Die by Sherwin Nuland
Chatto, 278 pp, £15.99, May 1994, ISBN 0 7011 6169 8
‘He had never had a moment when death was not terrible to him,’ reports Boswell on the occasion of needling his famous friend with the news that the atheist philosopher David Hume had died well and without repentance. ‘The horror of death, which I had always observed in Dr Johnson, appeared strong tonight.’ Sherwin Nuland a surgeon from Yale, speaks to the Johnson in each of us, to our hunger for knowledge of our inevitable end: ‘Everyone wants to know the details of dying ... we are irresistibly attracted by the very anxieties we find most terrifying.’
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Letters
Vol. 16 No. 18 · 22 September 1994
From Brian Vickers
In his interesting review of Sherwin Nuland’s How We Die (LRB, 18 August), Thomas Laqueur doubts that greater clinical knowledge of the process of dying will help us approach death with more equanimity. This issue figured in many Renaissance debates about the desirability of learning an ars moriendi, one of the most acute responses being that of Francesco Guicciardini in his Ricordi (1530), suggesting that nature has in fact programmed us to ignore death:
It is certainly a remarkable thing that we all know we have to die, and we all live as though we were sure of living for ever. I do not think the reason for this is that we are moved more by what we have before our eyes and impresses our sense, than by distant things which cannot be seen. For death is close at hand and one can say that our daily experience shows it to us at every hour. I think it arises from the fact that nature wishes us to live according to the course or order of this world. Not wishing it to remain as if dead and without feeling, nature has given us the power to ignore death – if we thought about that, the world would be full of indolence and torpor.
The art of dying may be naturally unlearnable.
Brian Vickers
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology,
From Robert Ostermann
Thomas Laqueur asserts that our alienation from the experience of death began at the start of this century. This does not seem true of Ireland. I attended university in Ireland, starting in 1948, and in the six following years I was privileged to share the deaths of many friends’ parents, siblings, children etc. In every instance, the body was laid out in the home, where mourners of all ages came to light a candle and pray for the deceased. It astonished me, a stupid Yank, to see death so thoroughly domesticated and, especially, to observe that not even the smallest child was numbed or terrified by the experience. I was all the more impressed because only several years before I had been seeing, and making, lots of dead soldiers in Europe.
The memory of that ancient war experience raises a perhaps more serious reservation about How We Die. These days we die in many ways unmentioned by Dr Nuland, a lot of them much less desirable than even an agonisingly painful lingering illness.
Robert Ostermann
Albuquerque, New Mexico
