The earth is an oyster with nothing inside it,
Not to be born is the best for man;
—W.H. Auden, The Dead Echo
Wow. That’s pretty depressing. In fact, I wrote that listening to Auden read “The Dead Echo”* from The Voice of the Poet series makes me want to lie down in the fetal position and turn out all the lights.
Is our human existence, as Auden suggests, so meaningless that we would be better off without it? No. Because Love.
In his famous soliloquy Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow Shakespeare’s Macbeth complains that
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
As an ardent nonbeliever, I don’t see how human existence signifies anything beyond itself. But our existence is nonetheless pretty awesome when considered on its own terms.
I’m pretty sure that there isn’t any anthropomorphized God up in outer space listening to all our prayers, a god who cares about every little thing that happens in the universe, including the death of every sparrow. Yet I see reason for hope in this terrifying realization because it informs me that human beings must rely upon one another instead of inventing a god in order to assuage our cosmic loneliness.
However, Auden makes another claim in “The Dead Echo” which haunts me to the core of my being:
A friend is the old old tale of Narcissus
In other words, our hunger for Love is merely a manifestation of ego since we are only capable of viewing the world through the prism of our own interests and our own self-perception. As Auden explains in his collection of essays called “The Dyer’s Hand” :
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both partners run out of good.
This is true, of course. But it hardly renders Love meaningless. The act of caring about others is selfish and selfless at the same time. It’s one of life’s many paradoxes. Our lives are full of paradox not because that’s how the universe is designed; we see life as being full of paradox because that’s how our brains are designed.
When Samuel Goldwyn complained that a script she had submitted “ended on a sad note,” Dorothy Parker noted
“I know this will come as a shock to you, Mr. Goldwyn, but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending.”
So what should we do about this whole being alive thing? Well, in addition to depressing the hell out of us in “The Dead Echo,” Auden provides us with some practical advice:
Throw down the mattock and dance while you can.
And as another poet notes, between birth and death, It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.
So the loveliest and most courageous thing we can do is acknowledge the hurt and ugly in our lives and still manage, somehow, to face the music and dance.
* Auden elsewhere refers to this poem as “Death’s Echo”
by Richard W. Bray
