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Feb. 6, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:40
634 Death Be Not Proud' Compared to 'Farewell, Father'
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Good evening, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's 5 o'clock on the 6th of February, 2007.
And why not do the death sandwich?
Why not have two death poems back-to-back?
Mine in a poetry cage match, match, match with John Donne's Death Be Not Proud, which is of course just a little bit more famous.
So let's have a look at his and see where the differences are, what I think is, what I think is so important, what I think is good and bad about it.
So this is Death Be Not Proud.
John Donne was a metaphysical religious poet from the 17th century or who lived from the 17th to the 18th century, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow, die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow.
And soonest our best men with thee go rest of their bones and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, and dust with poison, war, and sickness dwell, and poppy or charms can make us sleep as well, and better than thy stroke.
Why, swellest thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally, and death shall be no more.
Death, thou shalt die.
Now, I think this is a very, I mean, it's a, well, beautifully written poem, and I can certainly see the sentimentality that is embedded in the language, and how powerful that must be if you're a religious or a cultist kind of person.
But there are certain issues that I have with the general flavor, and this, of course, is just based on the writer's religious approach and religious upbringing and religious sentiments.
But, of course, the real challenge, or at least one of the real challenges, is that in personifying death...
You really have created a basic contradiction in the poem or in the approach, which is that death is the absence of life.
And so to personify death, to start the poem with death, be not proud, makes no sense.
I mean, unless you're religious, right?
Because if you're religious, then death really is associated with Satan.
And it is a lack of religious faith that would make you fear death.
And therefore, the fear of death would be satanic in its essence, or at least...
Non-Christian in its essence, because of course this is one of the basic paradoxes of Christianity that nobody has ever really seemed to be able to resolve, which is that if God is so great, what are you doing here?
Why are you wallowing in the muck of the physical when you could be floating up like an exhale of dandelion spores to the mighty realm of God?
Well, Of course, you would only fear death based on a lack of faith.
And so, death is associated with the satanic, with evil, with a lack of faith, with an absence of belief in God.
And so, when death is used here, in my view, because of the religious context of the writer, he is able to be personified.
Death is able to be personified because death is associated with Like, fearing a cab ride to a great party.
I mean, it would be pretty bizarre, right?
It's a bumpy cab ride, but, you know, and it's five minutes long, or ten minutes long, or an hour long, whatever you want.
It's a bumpy cab ride to the best party ever, where you'll never have to leave.
So, for a Christian to cross over the threshold of death is to vault, pogo-stick-like, into a magical land of wonder, joy, and helium balloons.
So, for a religious writer, death, or the fear of death, is associated with, at best, a lack of faith, and at worst, a negation or an anti-theistic approach to life.
So, when the poem starts out, Death Be Not Proud, what, in my view, Donne is really talking about is Satan, don't be proud.
Some have called the mighty and dreadful, say, as...
John Donne. And he says, you're not that way.
Because you think you overthrow, but I don't die.
And you can't kill me.
And this is a very basic aspect of religion, that you can't be killed.
It's one of the reasons why apostasy, or lack of fealty or fidelity to God, is a worse fate than physical death.
This is the fundamental reversal of values.
Inversal of values, let's go with that.
And this inversal of values that occurs in the religious context is very important.
Spiritual death or an alienation from God is far, far, it's infinitely worse than mere physical death, right?
Which is why you get murder and torture and suicide bombers and so on.
I mean, this is a basic sort of fact and reality.
So, death is really only, in the religious context, is only mighty and dreadful to the body, not to the soul.
I mean, by this I don't mean the way that we use the word soul, but I'll just use the word soul here in the Christian context.
Death is a murderer of the flesh, but a liberator of the soul, a liberator of the spirit.
So... In the same way, and I'm not saying Dan is advocating or even thought of any of this kind of stuff, but the logic for me seems sort of inescapable that...
The same approach that the Crusaders used in the Middle East during the Crusades, of course, was to get fieldfuls of Muslims together and to convert them to Christianity and then to cut their throats, right?
So they would not... So to slaughter the body to release the spirit, that is a very powerful gesture.
And of course they had already been given immunity from sin, right?
By the kings and the priests and the popes to go to the Holy Land and do whatever they felt like it.
That was their payment, right?
Which is freedom from guilt. Which is a considerable payment for a lot of people.
So... When...
John Donne is addressing death, or this sort of unbelief or lack of faith in God, then he's saying, don't be proud because all you do is rule over the material.
All that death does is rule over the physical.
And that, of course, is the Christian view of Satan as well, so I think it ties fairly nicely together.
Satan is the god of this world.
This world is the valley of tears and temptation and blood and loss and pain and all this kind of stuff.
And God rules over the next world.
So, the fact that our body dies means nothing.
The fact that Satan or death has dominion over the physical means nothing.
We can't be killed.
We are immortal, right?
And... I mean, the problem with this is just not true.
I mean, that's the basic problem that I have with this beautiful poem, a wonderfully written poem, that, of course, is informed by culty Christian madness and, you know, precious little scientific understanding of anything.
So, when he says that...
When he says to death, be not proud...
Then he's saying that you, Satan, or death, have dominion only over my physical being, not over my soul or my spirit.
So you can't kill me.
All you can do is release me to God.
And because I know that I'm going to God, or I believe I'm going to God because I've lived a good life, then I don't have to fear you.
I, in fact, could find quite the opposite.
Ryan says, has death been a proud?
And then he goes on. He said, from rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be.
Much pleasure. Then from thee much more must flow.
And soonest our best men with thee do go, rest of their bones and souls delivery.
And I'm not sure where the emphasis would be on all of this, so sorry for sounding like I'm learning the mother tongue of the Englishness.
But rest or sleep.
So this is the...
This is the same sort of metaphor that Shakespeare uses.
Sorry, sleep is death's twin.
That when you go to sleep, it's actually quite pleasurable.
It's nice to fall asleep, it's nice to go to sleep, and sleep allows you to wake up rested.
And so what he's saying is, from rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, it's a shallow imitation of death, much pleasure flows from sleeping or from resting.
And the soonest our best men with thee do go, rest of their bones and souls delivery.
And what I understand by that, I mean, I'm certainly no Dunn scholar, but what I understand from that is that he's saying, you don't, not only do you not frighten me death, but I'm actually looking forward to it.
Because it's a short rest, and we know that rest and sleeping is pleasurable.
And when our best men go with death, They rest their bones and deliver their souls.
Rest of their bones and souls delivery.
So they rest their bones, so they're resting, which is great, we're tired from life, we get to rest with death, and then they deliver their souls to God, or the souls are delivered to God, souls delivery, which is great.
And then the poem goes on and says, Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men, and dust, with poison, war, and sickness dwell.
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well, and better than thy stroke.
Why swellest thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally, and death shall be no more death.
Thou shalt die. And the part that I get in the middle here is, not only should you not be proud because you can't kill me, death, Satan, but also I'm looking forward to this rest before delivering my soul to God.
So it's a good thing that you're bringing me.
It's a wonderful thing. And your friends suck!
The company you keep is somewhat...
No. So he says, you're a slave to fey chance.
Kings and desperate men and dust with poison, war and sickness dwell.
So... Fate causes death.
Chance, accidents, kings through war, desperate men through robbers.
So these are the people that you hang with or what you're dependent upon.
Death can't make...
I mean, again, this is a sort of pre-biological view or sort of pre-scientific view of the human body, but I think Dunn is saying that You have no power, death.
You have to get a king to start a war.
Someone has to get sick.
And then you carry them off.
But you're a slave. You have no power.
At all. And...
You dwell with poison, war, and sickness.
So this is sort of like the fourth horseman of the apocalypse or whatever, but...
People...
You hang out with lowlifes, basically.
These are your friends, right?
And... Then he says, and poppies or charms can make us sleep as well, and better than thy stroke.
Why swellest thou then?
One short sleep past.
Now, I don't know if poppies or charms can make us sleep as well.
Poppies is a sopaphoric, right?
I mean, it's a... I guess you get heroin from poppies, and so...
You can either get a dreamlike or a dreamless kind of rest through poppies, which is good.
And whether he's using sleep here and the rest, or you can kill yourself with poppies through killing yourself by taking heroin or...
I'm not sure what charms are.
I'm sure that's something fairly specific to his time.
Or maybe it's just spells or something.
But that...
But you can take a drug or whatever, and you can rest better than what death can do to you.
And if you kill yourself through that, it's better than what death can do to you.
And then he says, Why swellest thou then?
One short sleep past.
Actually, I like that really. It's really nicely put.
One short sleep past.
We wake eternally, and thou, death shall be no more.
Death, thou shalt die.
And that, of course, as we'll get to in a second, is quite a deviation from at least the poem that I've written about death.
And this is, sort of laughing and scorning at death, is something that is common, of course, in particularly macho and mystical types of cultures.
I mean, the Islamic world is very, the Koran is full of this kind of stuff.
Full of this kind of nonsense about how it is better to fight against the infidels than to have a pleasant and happy life.
It is better to die in the service of Allah than it is to whatever, whatever, whatever, right?
Because, of course, you have to get people addicted to the death worship, otherwise they're not very willing slaves to be fed to the fires of war and ambition and the expansion of the cult.
Still working on that for us.
It's tricky.
I need some puppets and some pins, I think, and if you all can send me a bit of hair, that would be great too.
So, it's a beautiful poem in that it expresses the sentiment and the thought very accurately, and there is a kind of, huah, kind of defiance to it in the face of death, but, you know, the only problem that I have with it, which is the same problem that I have with 99.9% of Shakespeare, is that it's completely and totally not true.
Right? There is no afterlife.
Death does end us.
We don't get to skirt past it like we're taking a side entrance out of a burning ship and go slither off to some happy eternal realm of perpetuity.
We do die.
Death, you know, if you want to put it in that anthropomorphic kind of way, death wins.
So death can only really be personified in a poetic sense, if you're willing to accept that there's something beyond death, and also that death is a test of faith, and therefore is associated with the ultimate personification of faith testing, which is the devil.
And given that none of that's true, then this is just a wonderful poem about Scientology.
It's a wonderful poem about the guys who cut their balls off to go join the comet.
No matter how beautifully and spiritually and deeply and movingly and so on it's expressed, it's not true.
Death is not a sleep from which we awake and go and kiss the hem of God's garments or anything.
Death is just the cessation of the biochemical, electro-neurological energy that animates us.
So when the batteries in the radio run out, the voices mysteriously stop.
They don't go and join the great DJ in the sky, right?
They just kind of run out.
So that's sort of one of the problems that I have with these kinds of poems.
Yes, they're lovely to read, and yes, they're interesting snapshots of the kind of crazy stuff that people, well, I wish I could say used to believe, but still do believe.
But I think that it's not particularly helpful When it comes to actually helping human beings deal with the problem of death without slithering into fantasy.
You don't deal with financial problems by daydreaming about winning the lottery.
Fairly important things to figure out in terms of human responsibility.
Basic human responsibility.
You don't deal with lovelessness through masturbation.
And you don't deal with problems at work by calling in sick.
And even those aren't really as bad.
I think the better one is you don't deal with financial problems by fantasizing about winning the lottery.
You don't deal with problems of being overweight and out of shape by watching people do gymnastics.
Unless you're dealing with lovelessness in the same kind of way.
So, to me, to counsel people, as John Donne does, to deal with their problems of dying by pretending that death doesn't work, so to speak, or death, it doesn't take, you know, it's like it just doesn't quite take.
That, I think, is a fundamental misdirection.
A lie, frankly.
It's a pious lie, which actually kind of makes it all the worse, because he's actually trying to, I guess, comfort people in a way.
But, sort of, ha ha, death!
You mean nothing to me!
I mean, that's just nonsense.
That's not how you deal with the challenge of mortality, by pretending that it doesn't exist.
It's not responsible. It's not rational.
It's not helpful. It just kind of drugs people into fantasizing that they're going to come back to life.
I'm back! I mean, it's the kind of poetry that makes you keep a holy water and a steak handy, right?
I come back to life!
Oh god, I can't do those voices without water.
So... That to me is the fundamentally frustrating thing about a lot of poetry in this kind of realm, certainly from this kind of age.
And Shakespeare's too, right?
It's also ridiculously statist and also ridiculously religious, fundamentally, that it's just kind of annoying.
You know, the heroic battles that occur in all of the Henry's and the Tudor series and so on.
It's just horrendous.
And, of course, as I've talked about before, Shakespeare, not so much with the property rights, not so much with freedom, not so much with integrity, not so much with the rights of children, not so much with the rights of women, not so much...
I mean, there's a purely medieval-slash-Renaissance view of the world, which is...
Mystical, subjectivist, fantastical, religious, cultish, slavishness in terms of the kings.
And so Shakespeare, to me, along with these kinds of writers done, and to some degree Pope and others, it's all just a photograph of a relatively crazy time in human history.
If... If somebody's in an asylum and can put together words in startlingly original kinds of ways, then I think that's very interesting.
That tells you a lot more, in a sense, about that person's madness, though, than it does about reality.
The gap between what the person is writing about and reality is highly indicative of that person and their relationship to reality, but the poem itself has nothing to do with reality.
It's a drug.
It's a sopophoric.
It is something that you use to not deal with the problem of death.
Well, it doesn't really matter.
It doesn't count. It doesn't take. I get to come back to life.
Whee! I mean, that's not exactly how you deal with this kind of stuff.
I mean, I can't imagine a doctor saying, I'm sorry, Mr.
Molyneux, you have terminal cancer, but don't worry.
Um... You'll come back to life.
It's like, really? Am I going to come back to life?
Can you not lock that silver thing in the basement so I can sort of get out without being cold or whatever?
It's extraordinarily unhelpful.
And there is the great temptation to provide people this immediate comfort, right?
So if they have genuine financial troubles or difficulties or debts, the temptation is to just give them some money, right?
Money problems are not solved with money.
They're not solved with... Well, a whole bunch of other things that aren't necessarily involving money.
Similarly, you don't deal with the problem of death by pretending that death doesn't exist.
I mean, you can try, and obviously lots of people succeed, but it does much, much, much more harm than good.
Much, much, much more harm than good.
Taking refuge in fantasies of coming back to life is incredibly destructive on so many levels.
It doesn't give you the richness of tasting the deep bit of fruit that is your own mortality.
It doesn't give you the spur to ambition.
It doesn't give you the spur to virtue.
It just gives you a...
Eh, I can put it to one side because it doesn't really exist.
And the personification of death as an enemy...
Is, again, I think highly, highly, I'd like to say irresponsible, though that's projecting current values backwards in time, although there were even atheists around at this time who had probably many more sensible things to say.
But the personification of death as an enemy is a childish and spiteful reaction to an inevitable physical state, or statelessness, the ultimate state of society, those in the ground.
That's when we'll get to be free, my friends, when they throw it in the ground and hurl some dirt on her face.
But this personification of death as an enemy is...
Death is just the winding down, right?
The accumulation of toxins and the reproduction of cells that deteriorate over time and to the point where the energy of the organism cannot be sustained and, you know, everybody falls down and goes boom.
I think that you need to swim in this black lake.
I think that you need to drink this potion deep of death.
It shouldn't really come as a surprise.
And, you know, frankly, nobody can believe fundamentally and deep down.
Actually, I shouldn't really say that. There are people who die for this kind of stuff.
But I think that's more because... When you become addicted to religion, your life becomes less and less meaningful and pleasant.
You get eaten out from the inside by an evacuating kind of fantasy.
And so the desire for an afterlife, which people are willing to act on to the point where they're willing to kill themselves or others, Arises less out of a love for the next world as it does out of a hatred of this world.
And no matter how good the next world is, for me, at least if there was such a thing, a bird in the hand is still worth two in the bush.
So it's like, yeah, okay, maybe.
But hey, if I've got an eternity to enjoy the graces of God and to sing with the angels, fabulous.
You know, there's no rush.
Because... This life I have.
This life I've got. This life I'm already working this mojo.
I'm already working this angle.
I got it cornered. I got this life.
We're down. We're good. Everything's humming along.
This life I'm good with.
And if I've got an eternity, then this life in the face of eternity is one millimeter to the right of non-existence.
Next to eternity, even a life of a hundred thousand or a million years would be an irreducibly small instant.
So if I've got an eternity to enjoy my time with God, then stretching out this old life doesn't really do me that much harm, right?
So, that doesn't really make much sense to hasten towards that.
On the other hand, If I really do believe that there's this great, wonderful afterlife and I, you know, kill myself or engage in risky behavior, then what if I'm wrong?
What if I'm wrong?
I wrote in a poem, and I'll try and read it in a little bit.
I kind of liked it. About a woman who sacrifices herself to everyone else all the time.
But at the end of the poem it goes something like this, and at the end of her life she found not a feast for the starving, no lights for the blind, nothing but the chilling regret of quietly discharged atoms, discharged from life, merely cooling towards the merely atomic, the merely material.
And I think that it's possible that people do have this belief, right?
As the oxygen-starved brain upon death does produce visual hallucinations that I'm sure comfort people.
And we can see, of course, why this might occur, that people are going to feel good when they die.
Lots of endorphins, lots of, you know, going to join the relatives and And that occurs because when people are dying, you don't want their cries to draw predators and all this kind of stuff, right?
It's possible that there is that sigh and die kind of thing.
But there's no reason to believe that there is, and there's every reason to believe that there's not.
I mean, the dead far outnumber the living hundreds to one, and you'd think that if they were all over the place, there would be some minor evidence of them, or at least some energy would be perceived as leaving the body on death, and this kind of stuff.
I mean, there's no evidence whatsoever for any kind of afterlife.
So this one we've got, right?
We're driving this car, so to speak.
So maybe if we roll ourselves off a cliff out of the car, we'll get to fly.
But, you know, pretty much kind of like the bird in the hand with two in the bush kind of thing.
So it can't be, I believe, that...
I mean, assuming there's not some mental illness and lithium-based...
Or some... Some uppy-downy kind of manic depression kind of thing going on, or mood affective disorder, or whatever it is.
Assuming that is not the case, then it seems highly, highly unlikely that anybody would wish to trade the life that they've got, if they're enjoying their life.
If they're enjoying their life.
And life is not always perfectly enjoyable, but for the most part, I've got to tell you, it's a real blast.
So if you're enjoying your life, then you're going to spin out what you've got.
And yeah, you know, if you want to sort of have this fantasy of some other life afterwards, I mean, I'm going to tell you it's not true, but that's not particularly relevant.
The relevant thing is that you're not going to accidentally on purpose drive your car off a cliff to go and join the glorious angels of your particular deity.
Because you're having a good time in your life.
You're enjoying yourself. It's rich.
It's wonderful. It's challenging.
It's painful. It's rewarding.
All of the good stuff that goes on in life.
So you're not going to want to die.
So the people who have religious faith in the beauty of an afterlife do not end up Killing themselves or others are doing accidentally on purpose, suicidally kind of things, because they just so desperately want to go and join this afterlife, but because this addiction to this afterlife has robbed them of pleasure in the here and now.
And the here and now becomes a rankling, irritating hair shirt that you wish to scrape off with your nails if you have to.
But it's not that they love their life, but love the afterlife more.
As they continue to love the afterlife more, which is the love of fantasy, the more they're going to dislike what they actually have.
So it's more, I believe anyway, it's more of a hatred of the existing life that drives people to this kind of nonsense than it is anything to do with a love of the afterlife.
It's not that you break up with your girlfriend because you think there's a better girlfriend just around the corner.
You just can't stand your girlfriend that much right now and haven't for some time.
So you don't divorce life to marry someone better, i.e.
God. You just divorce life because you hate your life.
And that, I think, is really what's going on there.
So the approach that I take sort of in my death poem or funeral poem Which is different is that I don't personify death.
In fact, I explicitly reject the personification of death.
I say, death is not stalking you.
It's just approaching. It's just approaching, the same way when you sail your ship towards a buoy.
The buoy just approaches you.
It's not stalking you, and you're not stalking the buoy, I don't think, but it's just approaching.
Like tomorrow is approaching.
Tomorrow isn't stalking. And one of those tomorrows you will die.
It's not stalking you.
So I sort of explicitly reject the personification of death because that's stylistically maybe interesting but factually false.
Death is simply, is not an entity.
Death is not a being.
Death is not a punishment.
Death is not a reward. Death is not an opportunity.
Death is not a sleep from which we wake to go enjoy the glories of God.
Death is the watch running down.
I mean, would you write a poem about a watch running down, say, watch running down, watch having run down moment, be not proud.
I mean, it's silly, right?
It's only if you believe in the afterlife of the devil that this personification of death becomes at all sensible.
It doesn't... It just doesn't make any sense.
If you're writing a poem about a runner who can't make it through a marathon, it's a moment at which the runner decides to go from a trot to a walk.
Be not proud! It's just a diminishment of energy and capacity.
There's a couple of steps and then there's that last one, which admittedly is a bit of a doozy.
So, The personification of death, I absolutely reject.
The belief that life is cyclical because of things like the seasons and so on is, I think, one of the reasons why we end up with this idea that there's a cycle in life, right?
And I can't remember my theology to the point where...
I think the soul is created with conception, at least according to the Catholics.
But the soul is not...
So the soul is created with the first physical form, but then it becomes eternal.
So it's eternal, but it's created.
So I guess it's eternal in a forward-looking manner.
So... That the eternality of that soul does give you the idea that death is a transition, a doorway through which you go through.
And what I find so unsettling about Dunn's poem is the degree to which it turns an unease or a fear or a concern, at least about death, into a lack of faith.
And somebody quoted the Charge of the Light Brigade.
Ours is not the reason why.
Ours is but to do or die.
Do and die. It's that kind of stuff that occurs as well in the realm of war and in the realm of statist enslavement.
That people say, oh, there's no reason to be frightened of death.
Go into battle, my sons.
Who lives forever anyway?
And that idea that, you know, that Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar, as he lay dying, he said, I regret that I have but one life to give to my country.
Bleh! I regret that I have but one life to give for my country.
I'm sure that's totally made up by some propagandist.
He was probably coughing out his guts and calling for his mama.
But that's the kind of stuff that natural human fear of death, natural human unease around death.
Which, and I sort of don't want to get into this in too great a level of detail because I don't really have time, but for me at least, the death that we're afraid of is not in the future but in the past.
The death that we're afraid of is not the end of our days in our hospital bed when, wizened and dried out like papyrus, we cough up our black spittle and expire.
That's not the death that we're really afraid of.
The death that we're really afraid of is the death that occurred for us in the past within our own families and our educational environments and everything where we weren't allowed to have a being, a self, an identity, where we were squashed and crushed and locked in a little cage of nothingness and had to obey and conform and nod and bow and scrape and smile when we didn't want to and all of this.
That's the death that we fear, right?
That's the death because that we've already experienced.
That non-existence that we have already gone through because of the crushing conformity of those around us, the crushing requirements for self-erasure and conformity from those around us.
That cage we have experienced, that non-existence, that anti-existence.
Death is only non-existence.
That's not the torture. The torture is anti-existence.
And in a sense, that's what John Donne is preaching here.
He's preaching anti-existence.
So we all have a fear or a concern or an unease around death, and that's natural.
But he's saying, no, you must laugh in the face of death.
That's really what he's saying. Fear of death is lack of virtue.
Fear of death is lack of faith.
We laugh in the face of death.
Well, that's kind of anti-life.
It's kind of anti-reality.
It's anti-soul.
Because we are uneasy or scared or concerned or frightened around death.
To say that we should not be, or that it's a bad thing to be, or that we should laugh in the face of it, is, I think, kind of bad.
It's... Basically, when you're a kid, if you break your toe, it's somebody saying, Oh, it's not so bad.
Look at all the bones you haven't broken.
Oh, it's not so bad. Look at all those kids in India.
They don't even have enough to eat.
What are you complaining about your broken toe for?
Don't be such a suck. Don't be such a sucky fag.
Don't cry. That'd be ridiculous.
Look at this war wound.
Think I complained about a broken toe?
I mean, literally, it is that kind of stuff.
It is all your instincts and emotions you must turn to the opposite.
So fear of death is not resolved through acceptance of death, or is not ameliorated through acceptance of death.
It is, in a reaction formation kind of manner, transformed into a scorn and contempt for death.
But that's not healthy.
That's as healthy as, you know, you really want to go out with some girl, and you really, you know, you think she's got a great smile, a great laugh, she's your type, she's got a great personality.
Sexy! And then she says no, and you're like, I hate that woman.
She's the worst thing ever. I never liked her.
I hated her. I hate her. Because this poem is only written because John Donne has a fear of death.
And rather than exploring his fear of death, which, to whatever degree ability I had, I was trying to do in Farewell Father, rather than exploring it and trying to understand it and trying to get empathy with it and trying to gain perspective on it, By viewing all of the anthropomorphic features as residing within me and not within death.
You don't deal with a concern or a fear by reversing it and then considering it bad somehow to have that fear or concern or anger to begin with.
And this kind of poetry, which is uncommonly common in Christian poetry and also in war poetry, and also in, I mean, up until the First World War, in the sort of Rudyard Kipling kind of pro-war poetry.
I mean, I shouldn't say he was somewhat anti-colonial as well, but this kind of stuff is very, very common, where the natural instincts are turned completely on their ass, reversed, and you now must be the exact opposite of what you're feeling.
And that's desperately unhealthy.
Desperately unhealthy. If you have concern about death, you don't deal with that concern by laughing and scorning and mocking death.
You know, pumping yourself up.
It's the ultimate in leveling, right?
And that's really, I think, the fundamental issue that I have with these types of poems.
The fundamental coldness and inhumanity of these kinds of poems.
What? Afraid of death? Come on!
It's a gateway to a beautiful life.
Don't be silly. We laugh at death around here.
I mean, good God, how cold can you be?
How cruel can you be? And of course, this is the kind of stuff that is inflicted upon children as well in these and other kinds of writings that children were exposed to, often a lot younger than they are exposed to now.
But trying to humiliate death, in a sense, by scorning and rising above death without processing anything is just a reaction formation, and it's an example, for me at least, of the kind of unhealthiness that Christianity brings to bear on the problems of psychology.
Thank you so much for listening! I will talk to you soon.
No donations today. I look forward to some tomorrow.
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