Could there be a more powerful or ominous song about our mortality than the Dies Irae of the Requiem Mass? Various versions of it been used in musical compositions for orchestral performances and for movie soundtracks:
It’s been used by Mozart (Requiem), Berlioz (Symphonie Fantastique), Elfman (Nightmare), Verdi (Apocalypse), and Liszt (Totentanz). Essentially, it’s a song about The Last Day, The Judgment Day. It’s first words, “Dies irae,” translate to the day of wrath.” Ominous, right? Makes me think of my own shortcomings, errors, vices, and weaknesses. Certainly, hearing the Dies Irae can make one self-conscious, can conjure up darkness and nightmarish imagery. So, many horror movies demonstrate its effectiveness in reducing us to consider our mortality, evoking NIetzschean dread. It’s almost as powerful as Al Gore, John Kerry, and Joe Biden’s telling us climate change is an existential threat—it’s not. Although the Dies is about the Judgment Day, it has been used for centuries in funeral masses. Would it matter if a Day of Reckoning for all humanity occurs after one dies? A personal Apocalypse is scary enough.
Musing on Our Death Perspectives: Four Directions
Well, not to get too Freudian here, I’ll say that early on and in most, if not all, humans the realm of nightmares ultimately stems from an innate realization that life isn’t permanent. Regardless of the psychoanalytic and neurologic research, I cannot account for childhood nightmares unless I acknowledge that from the outset of life humans know they are temporary; thus, the work of the limbic system, maybe even the primitive brain in tying emotions to Time’s passage. In this context, the Dies Irae’s opening four descending notes in minor key sound the melody of death already playing in our heads.* Is this the prime example of a priori knowledge? Am I wrong in associating a child’s nightmares with an underlying sense of dread? Maybe. I’m not a psychoanalyst, but I have yet to meet a person who asks, “What’s a nightmare? Oh! I’ve never had one of those.”
Even if we do harbor a priori knowledge of death, we live in constant forebrain denial without some definite impending cause of personal doom like a prognosis of a terminal illness. We still believe death is an event in an undetermined future. As late CBS TV commentator Andy Rooney wrote, death is “a distant rumor to the young.” That notion might also apply to the elderly. I’m sure that it’s not a proximal rumor in the heads of people in their eighties, nineties, or 100s. I recall the centenarian French woman who stopped riding her bike at 100 and stopped smoking when she was 117. In 1997 Jean Louise Calment died at age 122 years 164 days. We know we’ll die, but just not yet, not right now. Repressing enables our waking hours that are happier times than our nightmare hours. Thus, some of us suppressing in daylight the ear worm of death, take unnecessary risks, a penchant more of the young than of the old but that is also present in some older, and presumably wiser, risk-taking adults like a centenarian riding her bike.
There are so many directions to go from here.
1) I’ll take this one first: The deaths of others, save those we know and love, are often of less concern than our own. We see it on the streets in inner cities where gang violence and drive-by shootings take lives randomly. We see it in fentanyl dealers who are responsible for deaths numbering over 100,000 in just the past four years in the US. And we see it in Russian TV pundits who, ignoring the 30,000 Russians killed each month in a needless war with Ukraine, go full MSNBC-ing in hate for and derision toward the West as they laugh about nuking the UK and the US in the absence of any cognition that they, too, would die in nuclear retaliatory strikes. Is it Garden of Eden hubris that makes people think they are godlike and eternal whereas others are not? Are they so afraid of Putin that they can’t acknowledge the deaths of all those young Russian men? Or, do they simply not care, thinking that they have an endless supply of the young to send to their early deaths? (They don’t, by the way) Why the callous punditry and flippant talk of war? Is it repression of knowledge that those pundits could also die?
2) Hector Berlioz, whose Symphonie Fantastique I referred to above, provides us with a second direction: The intertwining of Time and Death. Berlioz said, “Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.” For thousands of years philosophers have been obsessed with topics like Time and Existence, Life and Death, Flow and Stillness, Origin and Ending. Then physicists and biologists in recent centuries broached those subjects, supplementing, if not replacing, traditional approaches and placing Time and Death in the context of a physical world described by the math of entropy sans a spiritual complement.
After Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and other philosophers wrote that existentialism put them on the right track to understanding Existence, the biologists took over defining life and death, both labeled as physical processes with evolutionary roots in biochemistry. Those existentialists philosophers were struck, I believe, on anxiety and loneliness. Did they add anything to our understanding of death? Did they comfort anyone? Don’t those nightmares of youth derive from the solitary nature of each one’s death? Nina Simone sang of such isolation in “Sinner Man”?
“Oh, sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
Sinnerman where you gonna run to?
Where you gonna run to?
All on that day.” (Which, as if I have to tell you, is “That Day of Wrath, That
Dreadful Day”—either THE Last Day or Sinnerman’s Last Day)
The lyrics of the Dies Irae in the seventh stanza make the loneliness in dying clear:
Quid sum miser tunc dicturus What shall I, frail man, be pleading?
Quem patronum rogatourus, Who for me be interceding
Cum vix justus sit secures? When the just are mercy needing?
Yes, even if surrounded by loved ones, we do our own dying. And no one can stave off the inevitable. To whom will you run on that dreadful day?
3) I take the third direction from a quotation by the questionably anonymous English graffiti artist known as Banksy:
“They say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.” ** That’s where deeds play a role. That’s how legacy fights death’s finality.
You would like to be remembered, right? Not forgotten as most of the 100 billion humans have been forgotten during the 200-plus thousand years of our species’ history. Legacy keeps you “alive” a bit longer than your physical demise. Homer made that a motive for Achilles to continue to fight the Trojans in The Iliad. In Book IX, the great warrior says:
Mother tells me, the immortal goddess Thetis with her glistening feet,
That two fates bear me on to the day of death.
If I hold out here and I lay siege toTroy
my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies.
If I voyage back to the fatherland I love,
My pride, my glory dies…
True, but the life’s that’s left me will be long,
The stroke o death will not come quickly. —Book 9, ll 498 ff.***
Simple binary choice: Stay to fight and die a long-remembered hero or leave for a passive existence back home and the fate that Banksy says, that is, to have no one say your name. True, Achilles might be entirely fictional, but his deeds have kept him on the lips of people since Homer’s time and if his story had been passed down from the Bronze Age to Homer’s time, that’s over three millennia ago. Would you desire that? Imagine that like Achilles people keep speaking your name for the next 3,000 years. Sure, you’ll be really dead, but not to those who speak your name and talk of your legacy.
There was an interesting take on legacy in an episode 11 of the Orville, season 2. A time capsule opens the life of a person from 2015 with whom the character Gordon falls in love by recreating her holographically. Disappointed that he has to say goodbye, he is consoled by Commander Kelly Grayson who says, “People have been living and dying for most of human existence, but Laura is special because she reached across four centuries and got a guy to fall in love.” How many names do you know from centuries ago? Sure, some emperors (Augustus, Caligula), poets (Homer, Shakespeare), artists (Da Vinci, Michelangelo), composers (Vivaldi, Mozart), philosophers (Plato, Aristotle), and scientists (Galileo, Newton), they and maybe a few dozen others remain in collective memory.
4) The fourth direction takes us to the divergence between inner brain and forebrain. No amount of rationalization assuages us in light of the darkness. Sure, we can play logician, as Epicurus did when he wrote, “Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?” But logic can’t undo what illogic has done; the dread is already present, persistently present. Death might not be on our minds during busy occupations, but whenever the distractions of life abate…
It’s Not All Bad News, Buckaroo
5) Should we be pessimistic? No.That we know there’s an end provides us with a motive for getting, doing, and being the most we can get, do, and be in the NOW. And just about everyone who isn’t wallowing in self-pity knows this. Keep Jean Louise Calment in mind. She’s a model of longevity and activity, having lived on her own into her 100s, having never heated her house in winter, and having her daily olive oil. Or think of my late friend Joe Hardy who died on his 100th birthday. Joe founded 84 Lumber, a five-star resort, and then, in his mid-90s, a development and real estate company. Joe showed up at the office early each day, even going there a couple a week or so prior to his death. Always optimistic, Joe held the motto “Nothing is impossible.” Well, nothing except staving off death. But his optimism lasted to his last hour as he died telling others to continue his lavish 100th birthday party without him.
Is optimism in the face of death foolish? Depends on the perspective. Up until that last breath, we’re all still part of this world, all still fully alive. There’s really no half-dead-half-alive state even though doctors have resuscitated the assumed clinically declared dead and some have woken on the coroner’s table. The conditions of being either alive or dead makes being alive the most significant reason for optimism. There’s always that thought that life will run at the very least a little longer than the present moment.
Hold on, Buckaroo, for the entire ride. It will be bumpy. The animal of life will try to buck you off at times, but short of dying, you’ll continuously get back on to ride some more.
*You can hear its multiple versions on Youtube videos. The words are:
Dies iræ, dies illa
Solvet sæclum in favilla
Teste David cum Sibylla
Quantus tremor est futurus
Quando iudex est venturus
Cuncta stricte discussurus
Dies iræ, dies illa
Solvet sæclum in favilla
Teste David cum Sibylla
Quantus tremor est futurus
Quando iudex est venturus
Cuncta stricte discussurus
Quantus tremor est futurus
Dies iræ, dies illa
Quantus tremor est futurus
Dies iræ, dies illa
Quantus tremor est futurus
Quantus tremor est futurus
Quando iudex est venturus
Cuncta stricte discussurus
Cuncta stricte (cuncta stricte)
Stricte discussurus
Cuncta stricte (cuncta stricte)
Stricte discussurus
**Robin Gunningham?
***The Iliad. Trans. by Robert Fagles. Penguin Books
- It's a Wonderful Life: (1946)
- Vault of Horror (1973)
- The Exorcist (1973)
- Star Wars IV: A New Hope (1977)
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
- The Shining: (1980)
- Home Alone: (1990)
- Batman Returns (1992)
- The Nightmare Before Christmas: (1993)
- The Lion King: (1994)
- Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
- Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: (2001)
- Attack of the Clones (2002)
- The Apocalypse (2002)
- Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: (2007)
- The Good Place (2019)
It’s been used by Mozart (Requiem), Berlioz (Symphonie Fantastique), Elfman (Nightmare), Verdi (Apocalypse), and Liszt (Totentanz). Essentially, it’s a song about The Last Day, The Judgment Day. It’s first words, “Dies irae,” translate to the day of wrath.” Ominous, right? Makes me think of my own shortcomings, errors, vices, and weaknesses. Certainly, hearing the Dies Irae can make one self-conscious, can conjure up darkness and nightmarish imagery. So, many horror movies demonstrate its effectiveness in reducing us to consider our mortality, evoking NIetzschean dread. It’s almost as powerful as Al Gore, John Kerry, and Joe Biden’s telling us climate change is an existential threat—it’s not. Although the Dies is about the Judgment Day, it has been used for centuries in funeral masses. Would it matter if a Day of Reckoning for all humanity occurs after one dies? A personal Apocalypse is scary enough.
Musing on Our Death Perspectives: Four Directions
Well, not to get too Freudian here, I’ll say that early on and in most, if not all, humans the realm of nightmares ultimately stems from an innate realization that life isn’t permanent. Regardless of the psychoanalytic and neurologic research, I cannot account for childhood nightmares unless I acknowledge that from the outset of life humans know they are temporary; thus, the work of the limbic system, maybe even the primitive brain in tying emotions to Time’s passage. In this context, the Dies Irae’s opening four descending notes in minor key sound the melody of death already playing in our heads.* Is this the prime example of a priori knowledge? Am I wrong in associating a child’s nightmares with an underlying sense of dread? Maybe. I’m not a psychoanalyst, but I have yet to meet a person who asks, “What’s a nightmare? Oh! I’ve never had one of those.”
Even if we do harbor a priori knowledge of death, we live in constant forebrain denial without some definite impending cause of personal doom like a prognosis of a terminal illness. We still believe death is an event in an undetermined future. As late CBS TV commentator Andy Rooney wrote, death is “a distant rumor to the young.” That notion might also apply to the elderly. I’m sure that it’s not a proximal rumor in the heads of people in their eighties, nineties, or 100s. I recall the centenarian French woman who stopped riding her bike at 100 and stopped smoking when she was 117. In 1997 Jean Louise Calment died at age 122 years 164 days. We know we’ll die, but just not yet, not right now. Repressing enables our waking hours that are happier times than our nightmare hours. Thus, some of us suppressing in daylight the ear worm of death, take unnecessary risks, a penchant more of the young than of the old but that is also present in some older, and presumably wiser, risk-taking adults like a centenarian riding her bike.
There are so many directions to go from here.
1) I’ll take this one first: The deaths of others, save those we know and love, are often of less concern than our own. We see it on the streets in inner cities where gang violence and drive-by shootings take lives randomly. We see it in fentanyl dealers who are responsible for deaths numbering over 100,000 in just the past four years in the US. And we see it in Russian TV pundits who, ignoring the 30,000 Russians killed each month in a needless war with Ukraine, go full MSNBC-ing in hate for and derision toward the West as they laugh about nuking the UK and the US in the absence of any cognition that they, too, would die in nuclear retaliatory strikes. Is it Garden of Eden hubris that makes people think they are godlike and eternal whereas others are not? Are they so afraid of Putin that they can’t acknowledge the deaths of all those young Russian men? Or, do they simply not care, thinking that they have an endless supply of the young to send to their early deaths? (They don’t, by the way) Why the callous punditry and flippant talk of war? Is it repression of knowledge that those pundits could also die?
2) Hector Berlioz, whose Symphonie Fantastique I referred to above, provides us with a second direction: The intertwining of Time and Death. Berlioz said, “Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.” For thousands of years philosophers have been obsessed with topics like Time and Existence, Life and Death, Flow and Stillness, Origin and Ending. Then physicists and biologists in recent centuries broached those subjects, supplementing, if not replacing, traditional approaches and placing Time and Death in the context of a physical world described by the math of entropy sans a spiritual complement.
After Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and other philosophers wrote that existentialism put them on the right track to understanding Existence, the biologists took over defining life and death, both labeled as physical processes with evolutionary roots in biochemistry. Those existentialists philosophers were struck, I believe, on anxiety and loneliness. Did they add anything to our understanding of death? Did they comfort anyone? Don’t those nightmares of youth derive from the solitary nature of each one’s death? Nina Simone sang of such isolation in “Sinner Man”?
“Oh, sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
Sinnerman where you gonna run to?
Where you gonna run to?
All on that day.” (Which, as if I have to tell you, is “That Day of Wrath, That
Dreadful Day”—either THE Last Day or Sinnerman’s Last Day)
The lyrics of the Dies Irae in the seventh stanza make the loneliness in dying clear:
Quid sum miser tunc dicturus What shall I, frail man, be pleading?
Quem patronum rogatourus, Who for me be interceding
Cum vix justus sit secures? When the just are mercy needing?
Yes, even if surrounded by loved ones, we do our own dying. And no one can stave off the inevitable. To whom will you run on that dreadful day?
3) I take the third direction from a quotation by the questionably anonymous English graffiti artist known as Banksy:
“They say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.” ** That’s where deeds play a role. That’s how legacy fights death’s finality.
You would like to be remembered, right? Not forgotten as most of the 100 billion humans have been forgotten during the 200-plus thousand years of our species’ history. Legacy keeps you “alive” a bit longer than your physical demise. Homer made that a motive for Achilles to continue to fight the Trojans in The Iliad. In Book IX, the great warrior says:
Mother tells me, the immortal goddess Thetis with her glistening feet,
That two fates bear me on to the day of death.
If I hold out here and I lay siege toTroy
my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies.
If I voyage back to the fatherland I love,
My pride, my glory dies…
True, but the life’s that’s left me will be long,
The stroke o death will not come quickly. —Book 9, ll 498 ff.***
Simple binary choice: Stay to fight and die a long-remembered hero or leave for a passive existence back home and the fate that Banksy says, that is, to have no one say your name. True, Achilles might be entirely fictional, but his deeds have kept him on the lips of people since Homer’s time and if his story had been passed down from the Bronze Age to Homer’s time, that’s over three millennia ago. Would you desire that? Imagine that like Achilles people keep speaking your name for the next 3,000 years. Sure, you’ll be really dead, but not to those who speak your name and talk of your legacy.
There was an interesting take on legacy in an episode 11 of the Orville, season 2. A time capsule opens the life of a person from 2015 with whom the character Gordon falls in love by recreating her holographically. Disappointed that he has to say goodbye, he is consoled by Commander Kelly Grayson who says, “People have been living and dying for most of human existence, but Laura is special because she reached across four centuries and got a guy to fall in love.” How many names do you know from centuries ago? Sure, some emperors (Augustus, Caligula), poets (Homer, Shakespeare), artists (Da Vinci, Michelangelo), composers (Vivaldi, Mozart), philosophers (Plato, Aristotle), and scientists (Galileo, Newton), they and maybe a few dozen others remain in collective memory.
4) The fourth direction takes us to the divergence between inner brain and forebrain. No amount of rationalization assuages us in light of the darkness. Sure, we can play logician, as Epicurus did when he wrote, “Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?” But logic can’t undo what illogic has done; the dread is already present, persistently present. Death might not be on our minds during busy occupations, but whenever the distractions of life abate…
It’s Not All Bad News, Buckaroo
5) Should we be pessimistic? No.That we know there’s an end provides us with a motive for getting, doing, and being the most we can get, do, and be in the NOW. And just about everyone who isn’t wallowing in self-pity knows this. Keep Jean Louise Calment in mind. She’s a model of longevity and activity, having lived on her own into her 100s, having never heated her house in winter, and having her daily olive oil. Or think of my late friend Joe Hardy who died on his 100th birthday. Joe founded 84 Lumber, a five-star resort, and then, in his mid-90s, a development and real estate company. Joe showed up at the office early each day, even going there a couple a week or so prior to his death. Always optimistic, Joe held the motto “Nothing is impossible.” Well, nothing except staving off death. But his optimism lasted to his last hour as he died telling others to continue his lavish 100th birthday party without him.
Is optimism in the face of death foolish? Depends on the perspective. Up until that last breath, we’re all still part of this world, all still fully alive. There’s really no half-dead-half-alive state even though doctors have resuscitated the assumed clinically declared dead and some have woken on the coroner’s table. The conditions of being either alive or dead makes being alive the most significant reason for optimism. There’s always that thought that life will run at the very least a little longer than the present moment.
Hold on, Buckaroo, for the entire ride. It will be bumpy. The animal of life will try to buck you off at times, but short of dying, you’ll continuously get back on to ride some more.
*You can hear its multiple versions on Youtube videos. The words are:
Dies iræ, dies illa
Solvet sæclum in favilla
Teste David cum Sibylla
Quantus tremor est futurus
Quando iudex est venturus
Cuncta stricte discussurus
Dies iræ, dies illa
Solvet sæclum in favilla
Teste David cum Sibylla
Quantus tremor est futurus
Quando iudex est venturus
Cuncta stricte discussurus
Quantus tremor est futurus
Dies iræ, dies illa
Quantus tremor est futurus
Dies iræ, dies illa
Quantus tremor est futurus
Quantus tremor est futurus
Quando iudex est venturus
Cuncta stricte discussurus
Cuncta stricte (cuncta stricte)
Stricte discussurus
Cuncta stricte (cuncta stricte)
Stricte discussurus
**Robin Gunningham?
***The Iliad. Trans. by Robert Fagles. Penguin Books
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