Juri makes some good points. A modern person dying simply looses more than his pre-modern counterpart.
Selfhood as we know it hasn’t been around for all that long. Not so long ago an individual person dying didn’t have as much impact because persons weren’t as important as the hierarchy they belonged to.
Much is made of our rapid development technologically, but not so much of our subjective development. It’s an important omission because the errors from reading history through the lens of our present state of selfhood gives us the impression the ancients were talking about things they could not have been, and that error would disguise our present, unique condition.
Our current mobility exasperates the loss of dying. The sense of place has been displaced. Sense of home has been taken away from the body. Newly worldwide and instantaneous Selfhoods have taken the Copernican revolution too seriously and have become unable to construct space around them. That the center of the universe is beneath their feet and is from where they issue and return has become an impossibility. Cremation urns move mantle to mantle, city to city. Our concepts of the natural have become rarified. Our places of belonging have become commodities, places to be earned and displayed as surrogates, sublimations of the old hierarchical ways.
Preparing for the dying day would be preparing a place for it to happen. Pre-Copernican, the task would be to build a psychological space that moves as you move. Becoming its center by taking away all possibility of a center, the contents of the extra-sensory sphere homogonous; your existence, and the place from where you issue and you return made possible simply because of that homogeneity. Not metaphorically or symbolically, but as a psychological reality.
Very
Intriguing.
I would
have never considered mobility when answering to the question posed by Nyongesa.
Now after giving it some thought it seems pretty plausible to me. First of all
we now know how huge the world is and how many possibilities it offers. Some
hundred years ago people’s worlds were small. Most never left their countries
or even the cities they have been born in. They had no real notion of how many
adventures earth has to offer and the adventures they perhaps could conceive of
were few at best. Nowadays we have become proficient in thinking up and
devising events to occupy the spare time modern life has gifted us with. We now
know how much life has to offer to those who grasp for it and this knowledge
makes death seem far worse.
What is
more some 80 or 100 years ago to most people dying meant lying in a bed at the
house they have build being surrounded by their family and friends. Such an image
is itself a strong metaphor expressing that physical death does not terminate
our entire existence for the things we have build stay and thus does a part of
us.
Nowadays
elderly people a put into homes the same way old cars are towed off to a junk yard
where they rust and are finally turned into neat cubes of metal. The custom of
several generations living under the same roof has been abolished. Old people
are left to themselves. Many live their last days in solitude because the
children went to a different country to pursue a career.
In our
modern age where divorce is ubiquitous death has wed itself to loneliness and
they sired a child and named it “fear of dying”.
