On Art & Immortality

Literature, Death, and the Quest for Immortality

Writers have a strange relationship with mortality.

There’s an artistic principle ubiquitous among both masters of the literary craft and aspiring young writers: write what you know. It is not surprising that Anton Chekhov, a doctor by day, wrote a series of short stories centered around the medical profession, or that William Faulkner’s famous Yoknapatawpha County is a stand-in for his own Lafayette County, where he spent the majority of his life. As T.S. Eliot tells us in his monumental essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, “the business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones.” That is to say, Eliot was a great champion of expressing day-to-day experiences in poetic form and saw the poet as a force through which quotidian emotions could be exalted. Though Eliot tells us that a poet may also resort to emotions that are unfamiliar to him, the vast majority of poets and writers throughout the past several centuries have thrived on the poeticization of ordinary life—writing what they know.

Thus Zelda Fitzgerald’s ramblings come out of the mouth of Daisy Buchanan and Sylvia Plath’s preoccupation with childbirth finds a voice in The Bell Jar’s Esther Greenwood. The writer finds solace through the written word and, in transforming personal suffering into beauty, attains the sort of catharsis that Aristotle attributes to the beholder of art in his Poetics.

Yet there is a particular human experience—one that has fascinated writers since before the invention of the written word itself—that no writer can claim to have personally felt or witnessed: the onset of death.

Writers have been cracking at death for centuries, but because it is physically impossible to experience death and then tell the tale, all writing about death must be speculative—a strange meditative experience that only a literary mastermind can truly nail. Tolstoy, perhaps, comes closest of all of history’s great writers in capturing the experience of death—both in his novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich and in Levin’s mortality crisis in Anna Karenina. Yet one can argue that Tolstoy does not write about death per se—he writes about the fear of death, which is the closest one can get to articulating the experience of death in the human mind—after all, though death itself is universal, the universal experience of the human consciousness is fear of death. This is a topic that nearly all great writers have grappled with at some point in their careers, leaving us with such works as “Aubade” (Philip Larkin) or All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque).

The question then becomes, if writers are taught to write what they know, and if none of us can really know death, then why are so many writers so irrevocably hung up on the question of mortality? Writers seem to be more prone to “fear of death” syndrome than the average human, and these all-consuming thoughts of death seem to fuel many of the great works of literature. One might imagine, for instance, that Tolstoy, who turned to religion shortly before writing The Death of Ivan Ilyich, expressed his own struggles with mortality in Ivan’s many monologues throughout the short work. But the answer might not be that writers, in turning to the literary profession, become affected by “fear of death” syndrome—on the contrary, it seems that those anomalous humans who find themselves affected by the fear of death turn to art as a way to cope. Thus the man who most keenly fears death naturally becomes an artist.

There are two primary reasons that the death-fearing man is led to literature. The first, as we have previously discussed, is the element of catharsis. Writers write what they know—fear of death—in order to temporarily alleviate the fear and thereby cope with it. The ramblings of Ivan Ilyich might have given emotional respite to the aging Tolstoy; similarly, Larkin’s assertion in verse that death is inescapable might have provided solace to his wandering thoughts. Certainly, those who fear death or suffer in other ways may be likely to turn to writing to cope.

The second reason that the death-fearing man might stumble upon the business of artistic creation is an obsession with immortality. If one fears death above all else, the most straightforward antidote is to become immortal—or to come as close to immortality as possible. One path towards immortality is the creation of a work of art that outlives its creator. If we must all die, the idea that something on our planet will outlive us is a reassuring thought. And it is a thought that has been with us for thousands of years.

The most eloquent expression of an artist’s desire for immortality is in Plato’s Symposium, his famous dialogue on the nature of love, eroticism, and desire. The idea comes from Diotima of Mantineia, who discusses the nature of Eros, the god of love, with respect to immortality. Diotima tells us that Eros, whom we can conceptualize as the embodiment of passion coupled with love, is the love of immortality. It is precisely love and passion that leads human beings to desire to live forever and prolong their time on Earth. If Diotima is correct, and I believe she is, fear of death does not arise from the sort of existential sulking that we might associate with the likes of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche—the artist fears death precisely because he is filled with passion and emotion. I emphasize the word filled because it relates to Diotima’s ensuing verbiage, which I will discuss in just a moment here—but first, let us pause on the notion of passion. An artist is someone who experiences the world with a heightened sense of passion compared to the average human being; therefore, the artist experiences an increased desire to prolong that passion and to create something from it. The fear of death in a human being is the consequence of the experience of passion and the desire to release and prolong that passion for as long as possible. The artist, then, is the human being who feels life most acutely.

Diotima’s ensuing discussion on love and immortality tells us as much. A human being who experiences heightened love and desire becomes filled with the emotion—even pregnant with it. If love combined with passion is the desire for immortality, then we create immortality through either a literal pregnancy—the production of offspring—or through a pregnancy of the mind—the production of art. “For it is in this way,” says Diotima, “that all that is mortal is preserved: not by being ever completely the same, like the divine, but by leaving behind, as it departs and becomes older, a different new thing of the same sort as it was.” One sort of love creates a child—the prescription that Shakespeare explores in his first twelve sonnets in urging a young boy to reproduce in order to attain immortality. The other sort of love creates a work of art. Thus the desire for immortality—the fear of death and the experience of unadulterated passion—produces great art.

The fear of death—the most universal and yet the most unknowable human experience—is the driving force behind much of the world’s greatest literature and, by extension, greatest works of art. While we tend to think of writers and philosophers as brooding, sulky types (Kafka, Woolf, Plath, Dostoevsky, etc.), the sadness and emotion expressed in their magnum opera simply reflect a heightened sensitivity to life and an acute awareness of the fleeting nature of existence. In writing about death, the great writers do not simply seek to understand the mechanics of this universal experience—they attempt to give voice to the human consciousness and to wrestle with mortality through artistic expression. Writers are obsessed with death because they are passionate.

Perhaps, in demonstrating Diotima’s observation that it is love that leads writers to both contemplate death and create great works of art, writers achieve a paradoxical victory over death itself. For great art always lives on, and this may be the only true form of immortality available to us—not one that resists death, but one that creates an artifact that will live forever.

Only then does the writer defy the laws of physics and do what no other sort of human being can ever dream of—become immortal.

Yet immortality is seldom a solitary pursuit. The writer’s defiance of death relies on those who engage with his work—those who continue to prolong its life. Perhaps, then, in our own quests for immortality, we can help fulfill the writer’s dream and ensure these works live on—by picking up a book.

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