The Death Wish

 

Memento Mori

I still recall vividly a discussion I had one evening in first year university with a guy from Alberta, blonde, bearded, with granny glasses. I said that everyone had both a life wish and a death wish. He scoffed—preposterous. Nobody wants to die. And I was shocked, because I thought it was obviously true.

If my claim sounds Freudian, I did not get it from Freud. At the time, I knew little of Freud.

I meant simply that everyone secretly wants to die. There is an instinct that makes us fear death—easily explained by evolution. But there is another instinct that comes from somewhere else. 

I say the evidence is everywhere.

Everyone craves a beach vacation, a cottage on the beach, with the vast ocean before them. Why? Because they can feel apart from the world, only steps from eternity. There is a deep calm to being near the ocean.

It is the same calm one feels when walking through a cemetery.

Why do others crave a vacation or a cabin in the mountains? So they can look down on the world from above, be above all that, away from it all. Life looks small and insignificant and far away.

Why do people, for that matter, want to read novels, or watch movies? To escape, at least for a few hours, from their lives and from themselves. To forget they are there and just watch life go by, as God does. As saints in heaven would.

And why do young men actually seek risk, and danger? Why do they often eagerly sign up for war? 

The secret thrill is that they might die.

Each of us has an intuition that there is a somewhere else, a more perfect world. Each of us has an intimation that daily life is not our home. We yearn. We feel a nostalgia without knowing what for.

This, not incidentally, is behind many modern diagnoses of depression. The good doctors will always assume a desire to kill oneself or die to self is pathological, a “mental illness.” They will consider a general disappointment with the world a "mental illness."

This because they want to deny the existence of the spiritual. They act as materialist inquisitors against the heresy of idealism.

But the heart knows what it knows. Those who lack a secret death wish lack a soul.