When we all think we are immortal, that’s unavoidable, because our own death is to us completely inconceivable. When I think about my own death I imagine, from what I’ve seen, the story of someone called me, and whom I sketch to resemble me; I imagine this man ill, dying, dead, and borne to the cemetery. Yes, but if I pay attention I notice that I am present and following the funeral cortege and, therefore, in some way alive.
If I go further, I can overturn the world; I sweep away the last traces of human works from the earth; I imagine it without air or water, revolving around a sun already cold, but I’m always assuming I am a spectator, perched on some star, still present and so still alive.
It’s said that sleep is the brother of death. Yes. It’s like death in this, that I can form no idea of it. As I child I would try to grasp the exact moment that I fell asleep; an endeavour that kept me awake more than once. It’s evident, however, that you have to be awake to know that you are asleep. This is why my sleep doesn’t really exist at all for me; it’s only from external signs and the accounts of others that I surmise that I’ve been asleep.
From this I can well understand that human beings have often dreamt of assuring themselves of a comfortable refuge after their death and that they haven’t refrained from seeing themselves, in advance, wandering around their tomb or crowded with others in Charon’s famous ferry. To understand this illusion is to understand at the same time why it’s been proved so often that the soul is immortal, and also that such proofs, when irrefutable, prove nothing. My death is nothing for me and if I’m thinking about it, I’m really thinking about another life. In the same way that I can see myself behind the mirror, so, by an unavoidable illusion, the moment I think of myself I think of myself as alive. I’m just like the character who lit his lantern to go and see if it was really dark in the cave.
3/12/07 Pleiade II, no. 35, p.43
Translation copyright Michel Petheram
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