Passing
Sunday, December 1
For today, a Jisei from the 19th-century poet Kiba:
My old body:
a drop of dew grown
heavy at the leaf tip.
Skepticism about selfhood — or at least the sort that attributes a persistent, individuated soul to conscious experience — has become a bit of a theme in my posts here.
So too has the fact that this puts death, and thereby our lives, into perspective. Death is less of an ending and more of a change. Less like a light going out, more like dew falling off a leaf.
In the past, when I heard people speak about death like this, I mostly thought it was pure cope — the same sort of reassurance that I also saw in people who claimed confident knowledge of an afterlife. But developing Parfitian views about the self changed this for me. I came around to seeing Death as, actually, not such a big deal — more of a change than an ending — not because our life isn’t coming to a sudden halt, but because our life was never such a special thing to begin with.
Kiba wrote this poem on his deathbed, at the age of 90. I hope I can have the same serenity when my time comes.