Memento Mori

We might leave the eulogies for Pam Stewart elsewhere except to say we lost one kick-ass teutonic beauty with a zest for life, not so many years after we’d also lost her movie-star-handsome husband Bill. If any couple seemed destined for a hall pass to immortality it would have been Pam and Bill. Not so: memento mori.

The occasion provides the opportunity to remove a work of philosophy off the dusty shelves as we seek some real practical wisdom for the rest of us mere mortals. Lesson one is the subject of death.

Those of us who were with Pam in the days, the weeks, indeed the years, before her final curtain call knew how she would fight, fight against the dying of the light. Never mind that rage, rage were Dylan Thomas’ actual words in that refrain about (not) going gently into that good night. Pam was more of a fighter than a rager.

A few of us who had also been there with Bill in his final years couldn’t help but notice the preternatural equanimity with which he handled his ALS sentence. No medical industrial complex heroics for him. He’d lived life on his own terms and seemed at total peace with its trajectory.

Two lives, two deaths, that will help frame our discussion about our respective philosophical reckonings about life’s only certainty. We might view the session as our Member Monday final exam about learning how to die is really about learning how to live.

We might first revisit the Socratic premise that death is one of two possibilities: an annihilation, leaving the dead with no consciousness of anything; or a migration of the soul from this place to another. Neither is to be feared, he maintained, as what could be more pleasant than a long, dreamless sleep or, on the other hand, passage to another place (Hades) that opens the way to convene with such other immortal company. Or, as he taunts his tyrant accusers on the threshold of his death: “Now it is time that we were going. I to die and you to live but which of us has the happier prospectus is unknown to anyone but God.” So there.

So how to reconcile the version of Socrates who insisted that he knew nothing with the one who was declared the wisest man in Greece by the Oracle at Delphi. The seeming paradox evaporates when we learn to distinguish wisdom from knowledge (i.e. the so-called Sophists) and become lovers of wisdom i.e. philosophers. Such it was with the likes of the Stoics and the Epicureans as we discussed in MM 10/1/18 David Hume, the 18th century Scottish philosopher who faced his end “quite free from anxiety, impatience, or low spirits and passing (his) time with the assistance of amusing books.”

On the other hand . . . .

Please note the following RSVP Policy for Member Monday: RSVP sign-up opens up at 11:00am on Fridays via the City Club weekly Newsletter. Seats are first-come, first-served: the first 14 secure a spot at the table, the last 3 on the couch. Cancellations must be made 24 hours in advance or the standard Social Lunch rate applies.