The Reluctant Son has headed off to college and we were talking
about a philosophy course he is taking. This class is filled with books about death, Plato’s Apology, Phaedo, and Euthyphro were
the leadoff hitters, and a book I had not heard of – a novel by Don Delillo –
Zero K followed. My son was in the midst of
reading it and said that he didn’t really enjoy reading it, but that he thought
it was a profound book, and he wondered if I might read it too so that we could
talk about it. Is there better chum he
might have put in the water? Not for
this guy!
So, having read it, as we discussed it, I was curious about
his experience of knowing that he was going to die. I let him know that I first experienced the
sense that I was mortal on a visceral level during Freshman year in college,
when I was confronted by some of the same readings from Plato – and a bunch of
deaths in the Iliad and the Odyssey. I
wonder if I also became viscerally aware of my own mortality in the context of
being away from home for an extended period for the first time as well. In any case, that was my moment and I wondered
if this was his.
“Dad,” he said, “I first had that experience when I was
seven or eight.” He said there were
multiple occasions where he – generally in the evening – perhaps right before
going to sleep – realized that he would not always be here. He said it wasn’t so much a thought as a
realization and that it was deeply and profoundly unsettling – though it wasn’t
particularly anxiety provoking or worrisome – it was just a realization that
this is how it is. He went on to say
that he would reflect on these moments the next day and realize – again not
very verbally but deeply – that this was indeed what he had been aware of and
that he was still aware of it and he was unsettled by it.
“Wow,” I thought – and probably said. I was somewhat puzzled that this had never
come up before between us. He said he
didn’t feel any need to talk about it at the time – and it was the
case, in a very fundamental way, that neither his mother nor I could have changed things. And, despite being unsettled, he was not
overwhelmed by the idea – just aware of it. Not exactly sad, but different as a result of having had it. He was certain that, as they say, death, like taxes, is a sure thing.
We talked a little bit about this. These thoughts occurred before a series of
significant losses of two grandfathers and a number of favorite
great-uncles. It occurred after his
mother and I divorced, which certainly introduced ideas about endings into his
life. But there wasn’t, at least as far
as he could recall, a proximal stimulus for the thought. Unlike Plato, who argues in the readings he is doing that the soul is immortal – and that the philosopher, whose life has been
devoted to attending to the soul, prepares himself for his soul and body to part
ways at death, the reluctant son was just beginning to go to church and didn’t
have a strong sense of religious or spiritual immortality.
In Zero K, death as an issue descends upon the narrator’s
father – the billionaire in the story – in the wake of the billionaire’s second
wife contracting a terminal disease. He
married this woman after leaving the narrator and his mother without much of a
thought or look backward and while amassing what would be his considerable
fortune by writing programs that predict the stock market. The book opens with the narrator arriving at
a facility that is located precisely and approximately in the middle of nowhere
at a large institution that is largely underground to participate in this woman’s
(she is hardly a stepmother, though she is a lovely person and the son has more
affection for her than he has for his father) preparation to be preserved at a
very low temperature (not quite zero K, but that is the reference for the
title) until such time as her condition can be repaired, at which point she
will be awakened and returned to health.
This set of circumstances, over the arc of the book,
precipitates an existential crisis on the part of the father who seeks to
determine whether he should be “preserved” even though he is in adequate health
and does not “need” to be preserved until such time as a cure is
available. The son is drawn into this in
a variety of ways and meanwhile, life goes on.
The son takes up with a girlfriend and her son who is adopted from the Ukraine. His girlfriend’s adopted son gets drawn into
the Ukrainian conflict – and meanwhile our protagonist is drawn more deeply
into his life. He, and we, almost forget
the odd and dreamlike experience of being at the Convergence – the name of the preservation
facility that feels like a Kafka created space.
When he returns to the Convergence a second time at his father’s behest,
it becomes even more dreamlike, with all kinds of manikins and bodies in
various poses, but also, at times just jumbled together. These images seem to underscore the contrast
with Plato’s idea of immortality being a quality of the soul – this culture is
interested in the preservation of the body.
The reluctant son let me know that the novel was taught in
an interesting way. The professor
encouraged his students to pick a sentence – either one they found important or
even one at random – and to read it. The
class would then discuss it. His
experience was that each sentence served as a spring board to a new and
interesting way to put the book together.
I don’t think that would work for just any work, but this one, a dense
but still wonderful read, seems almost constructed for such an approach. There are feints and changes in
direction. This is a meditation on death
– and on the technological promise that seems to be just over the horizon – at least
for billionaires (and partially being currently funded by living breathing
billionaires) that the lives of our bodies can be extended and, perhaps, those
bodies can be preserved for later use.
Will we wake up with a new language installed in our brains? Will our brains and other organs be preserved
outside of our bodies – as the Egyptians did it? Will we travel to the next life on an
elevator that travels not up or down or sideways but at an angle more and more
deeply into the earth? To offer an
overall interpretation to a work like this that is simultaneously deep, complex
and so readable seems impossible.
The reluctant son and I talked about his dislike of the
narrator. There were quirks that the
narrator engaged in – naming people that he didn’t know – that put the
reluctant son off. To me, they were
aspects of his character that both made him human – they were ways that in a
story told from the first person I could connect with him and live through his
eyes – and that made him particular – other – I think in the way the reluctant
son experienced him as not just other but difficultly other – peculiar in an
off putting way.
I’m not sure that I helped him navigate this story (hopefully
the philosophy professor did) any more usefully than I have helped the reader
of this post do that. Dealing with the
finality of death is difficult enough – but what if we could live forever? Would we want to? One of the answers that is buried in this book
– buried with the billionaire’s second wife – is the idea that life is worth
living when we are living with people that we love. The billionaire did not love his first wife –
and this complicates things, I believe, for the son. The ways in which I loved – and failed to
love my own son’s mother – have certainly complicated things for him. I think a theme is that in this world which DeLillo
is depicting – one that, like my family, has deep schisms in it, there is still
the possibility of love – of loving others and of loving life – even in its
temporally constrained original version – the one where we don’t have to wonder
if we will awaken in a future where we will be different but one in which we
know that the world that we know here and now will, in fact, cease to exist.
Perhaps the sense of a circumscribed life as a place that
creates a space in which joy can be experienced will help my son and the class
deal with another meditation on death that is headed their way – Freud’s Future
of an Illusion. In this book, Freud
maintains that Plato’s (and the Christian Church’s) belief in an afterlife is a
defense against the realization that my son had at a very tender age – that we
will one day die. The uncertainty that
we have with an afterlife – it is unclear in Zero K that the technology
currently exists to awaken those who have been preserved – or whether we are
hoping that this, too, will be invented in the future, without knowing that
this will happen, is still, as of this writing, one of the great mysteries of
life. The question is how we go on
living without knowing how the story will turn out – how we move from that
realization that we will one day cease to be in this current incarnation – and the
entire universe as we know it will be wiped out. How, then, do we embrace that universe while
it is accessible to us? What of it do we
value and how do we celebrate it?
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