4 beyond wishful thinkingWith the end of consciousness, it is not just the conscious self that
disappears forever; it is the whole world that perishes, as it existed for
consciousness. Th e events and protagonists that fi lled it all vanish sud-
denly, in the instant of death, unless their disappearance has been fore-
shadowed by the ruin of the mind.
Th e person may fl atter himself that he has recorded his experience of
the world in lasting words. We know, however, that such rec ords bear
only a distant relation to the fl ow and richness of conscious life; at best,
they select from it, or use it, translating it into a language that hardly
resembles the real thing. Th e world of the conscious self cannot escape
to the page; it remains trapped in the dying body, which sucks it into
the grave and into nothingness.
No aft erlife, of the kind promised by the religions of salvation,
can— or, if it can, it should not— console us for our mortality. An aft er-
life would not suffi ce to give us back our bodies; we would need to be
given back the time of the historical world: the struggle and the con-
nection with other people in a time that is irreversible and decisive. To
be restored to our bodies and made forever young without being rein-
stated in the time of history would be to suff er the torture of an eternal
boredom. For this reason, portrayals of a paradise of eternal life in the
salvation religions remain unconvincing and even repellent. Th ey of-
fer us the shell of immortality without granting us what makes life
irresistible.
Th e embodied self is the same person who woke to the world in a
burst of visionary immediacy, who soon found that he was not the cen-
ter of that world but on the contrary a dependent and even hapless
creature, and who then discovered that he was doomed to die.
Th e frightfulness of death wears another face, alongside its annihilat-
ing relation to the good of life and to the experience of consciousness.
Th is third face of the terrors and evils of death has to do with not with
its destruction of consciousness and of life, when it occurs, but rather
with its eff ect on conscious life as each of us lives it.
We can best understand this eff ect in the form of a dilemma. One
horn of the dilemma is what happens when we face death. Th e other
horn is what happens when we fail to face it.
To face death squarely and per sis tent ly, without help from the feel-
good theologies and philosophies that abound in the history of religion