Death.
The Last Dance. The Big Sleep. The Grand Finale. The Toothless Grin.
We are all born with one guarantee in life, and that is that at some point, perhaps eighty years or ten days down the line, we will die. We never know how much time on earth we're going to get; only that we're going to get something.
As the eminent scholar William S. Burroughs once put it, "Death needs time like a junkie needs junk."
I know, it's not pleasant to talk about death -- some might even call it morbid (in fact, that's pretty much what the word means). However, just the other day, smack dab in the middle of Parents' Weekend, I found myself wandering one bright afternoon through our very own Dartmouth Cemetery.
And what a cheerful and uplifting experience it was! Sure, you're probably thinking, 'This guy's nuts! Absolutely whammo duck-billed crazy! Why would anyone choose to spend their Saturday afternoon hanging out with a bunch of headstones?'
Good question, soldier. But let's not dwell on my reasons for being in the cemetery in the first place. We'll just say that I happened to wander in there, quite by accident, actually, and once there I found myself transfixed -- transmogrified, even -- by the various graves that populate that shadowy place.
The Dartmouth Cemetery's headstones come in all sizes, from the majestic Sawyer mausoleum to a foot-long tiny stone that was simply inscribed with the name "Fred." Funny, isn't it, how we're even capitalists after we're dead? You can spend your whole life working fervently, trying to make as much money as you can, hoping to buy your way out of your gnawing existential misery (and it is this very attempt to stave off misery that fuels our economy, God bless it), and in the end, what do you have to show for it?
A big, fat headstone.
Not that I'm putting down big headstones. Far from it. In fact, if you ever happen to be strolling through our fair cemetery, why don't you check out the Bond family plot? Now that's some serious money. No doubt we could assiduously search the town annals to learn all the salient details of this family's Hanoverian existence, but what would be the point? Well, historical accuracy would be the point, but that's never been my point.
My point is that I'd like to be cremated.
Who wants to be feeling financially inadequate even if he or she is dead? You might argue here that once one is dead one isn't likely to be feeling much of anything, or one will be eternally zippy in some kind of paradise, or one will have been reincarnated as a frog and consequently won't remember, and sure, you'd have logic on your side, but not much else.
We Dartmouth students are, by and large, in a big hurry. We're already bounding up the first few lungs of the corporate ladder; we're grooving at thirty billion knots per second toward a happy, successful, Yuppie lifestyle.
And even those Dartmouth students who aren't Yuppies-in-training are still trying to seize the day, squeeze as much experience out of life as they possibly can.
But why bother? Outdoorsy type or three-piece suit, farmer or C.E.O., world traveler or President of the Gumby Fan Club, everybody ends up the same, and all they'll have to show for it is a slab of stone.
Look at Chester Carey. Poor old Chester has one of the older gravestones in the cemetery, dating back to somewhere in the nineteenth century. Was Chester an abolitionist? Did he support William Jennings Bryan? Did he read Mark Twain or William Dean Howells?
Who cares?
Of course, by now you may be starting to get fed up, and not just because I've besmirched the good name of Chester Carey. If death is unavoidable, then why should any lifestyle be criticized? With judgment in the afterlife remaining pretty unverifiable, who's to say that Yuppiedom isn't actually a wonderful choice, full of exciting possibilities and spiritual rewards?
Well, that's just the conclusion I came to after my brief sojourn amongst the rotting corpses. In the past I've been critical of capitalism and the way it's, you know, poisoned the planet and nearly every civilization on it.
But perhaps I was rash in my unkind assessment. It's not lifestyle that's the problem; it's DEATHstyle that's the problem.
Be a capitalist, screw the earth, buy your way into oblivion.
And then get cremated.
