MEDITATION 26
ON DEATHOMNIA MORS POSCIT; LEX EST, NON POENA, PERIRE 1
122: THE SIX MOST important necessities which the Creator has imposed on mankind are to be born, to move about, to eat, to sleep, to procreate, and to die.
Death is the complete interruption of sensual relations and the absolute cessation of vital action, which perforce leaves the body prey to the laws of decomposition.
These aforementioned basic needs are all of them accompanied by and made more agreeable by various sensations of pleasure, and death itself is not without enjoyment when it comes naturally, that is to say when the human body has passed through all its preordained phases of growth, maturity, old age, and decrepitude.
If I had not determined to make this a very short chapter, I would call to my aid the doctors who have watched the almost imperceptible changes which take place when living bodies change to inert matter. I would quote philosophers and kings and writers who, from the very fringes of eternity, far from being prey to pain and grief, have had cheerful thoughts which they could express with poetic charm. I would recall the reply of the dying Fontenelle, who, when he was questioned about what he felt, replied, “Nothing more than a difficulty to go on living.” But I prefer only to state my personal conviction, based both on analogy and on many observations which I feel have been carefully made, and of which this is the final one:
I had a great-aunt ninety-three years old, who was dying. Although she had been bedridden for some time, she was in full possession of all her faculties, and it was impossible to guess her true condition except by the lessening of her appetite and the weakening of her voice.
She had always been very fond of me, and it was I who sat by her bed, ready to help her most tenderly, but not the least prevented by this from observing her with the philosophical eye which I have always cocked at whatever goes on around me.
“Are you there, my dear nephew?” she asked me in a barely articulated voice.
“Yes, Aunt. I shall do everything I can for you, and I feel it would do you good to take a little really fine old wine.”
“Give it to me, my dear: liquid always flows downward.”
I hurried to lift her up gently, and made her swallow a half glass of my best wine. She instantly grew stronger, and looking at me with eyes which had once been very beautiful she said, “Deep thanks for this last service. If ever you reach my age, you will see that death becomes a necessity, just like sleep.”
These were her last words, and a half-hour later she had dozed off forever.
Dr. Richerand has described with such truth and philosophy the final changes in the human body and the last moments in the individual that my readers will thank me for making known to them the following passage:
“Here is the order in which our intellectual faculties cease and disintegrate. Reason, that attribute of which man pretends to be the sole possessor, abandons him first. At the beginning he loses the power to link his opinions sensibly and, soon after, follows his ability to compare and assemble and combine together several ideas in order to judge their net importance. It is then said that the sick man is out of his head, or that he is unreasonable or delirious. This delirium focuses usually on the thoughts which are most familiar to him, and his dominant passion is easily recognized: a miser confides the innermost secrets about his hidden gold; another man dies in the clutch of religious terror. Happy memories of the distant homeland, you, too, are reawakened in the exile, with all your charm and all your poignancy!
“After the powers of reasoning and judging, it is the faculty of associating ideas which is next struck down by the progressive destruction of death. This happens also in the state known as swooning, as I myself have proven. I was talking once with a friend, when I felt an insurmountable difficulty in clarifying two ideas upon whose resemblance I wished to form an opinion. I was not completely unconscious, however: I still kept my memory and my ability to feel, and could distinctly hear the people who were around me saying, He has fainted, and trying to bring me out of this state, which was not without a certain pleasure.
“The next thing to die is memory. The sick man, who even in delirium recognized the people who were near him, now does not know his close associates, and finally ignores those with whom he has lived in the greatest intimacy. Then he stops feeling anything. His senses, however, go out in a successive and set order: taste and smell give no further sign of their existence; his eyes are dimmed as by a dull cloud, and take on a sinister look; his hearing is still sensitive to both sounds and noise. This last is doubtless why the ancients, in order to assure themselves that death had actually occurred, used to shriek into the ears of their corpses. The dying man now cannot smell or taste, and he sees and hears no more. There is still left to him the sense of touch, and he moves about on his bed, stretches his arms this way and that, and changes his position constantly; he reproduces, as we have already said, the movements of a foetus who stirs in its mother’s womb. The death which is about to strike him down cannot terrify him, for he has no more thoughts, and he finishes life as he began it, without any consciousness of so doing.” (Richerand, NOUVEAUX ELÉMENTS DE PHYSIOLOGIE, ninth edition, Volume II, page 600.) 2THE TRANSLATOR’S GLOSSES
1. This says, “Death demands all: to die is law, not punishment.” The succinct profundity of this undoubtedly appealed to Brillat-Savarin’s orderly mind, as well as to the side of his nature which increasingly found itself preoccupied with the physical act of dying and its infinite spiritual ramifications. For many years before his death he had been known to express a fatalistic interest in the act, which at the same time had nothing morbid about it, and the song he composed and this present Meditation are but two proofs of his impersonal concern.
2. It is perhaps a pity that birth and death are so little watched, in our time. I have always felt that the miracle of parturition, endured or only witnessed, makes any human being wiser and more humble. He who turns away from it is the poorer for his act. And the same may be true of death, which so seldom happens nowadays in the awesome quiet of a familiar chamber. Most of us die violently, thanks to the advances of science and warfare. If by chance we are meant to end life in our beds, we are whisked like pox victims to the nearest hospital, where we are kept as alone and unaware as possible of the approach of disintegration. Those of us who escape bombs and the mad highways have a chance to live much longer than men of the early nineteenth century, but it is hard not to agree with one good reporter of the twentieth who wrote from his cancer-tortured heart, “Science is wonderful … but I sometimes envy my ancestors who died too early to know how painfully life can be prolonged.” For myself, I should like to die like the Professor’s aunt, ancient and aware, at peace in a known room, and in the company of a loved person who was not repelled or frightened by my end. I should like my children to agree with me …
The Physiology of Taste; or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
