Ina Schmidt

“Who knows how near to me my end is?”

When I heard this particular death cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach for the first time, I was surprised by the lively power that this piece radiated – as if the music wanted to counteract the worry about one’s own finitude with something, something that dares to engage with this unawareness of one’s own transience and finitude.

And yet, at the same time, there was a scepticism, a probing and doubtful detachment towards this courageous venture: can we oppose our own finiteness at all, is not the thought alone hope and longing?

Or can we just no longer do it today? Is it because in the 18th century it was still possible to cultivate a different approach to death and dying, the echo of the ars moriendi – the art of dying – which originated in the Middle Ages? At that time, such an art was not intended to drive death out of life, but to ensure that we could prepare ourselves for a dying that we could accept as good.

So can death be “tamed” in this particular artful way? The French cultural historian Philippe Aries was certain that death in earlier epochs had been just such a “tamed” death, embedded in ceremonies and world views, religious beliefs and ideas that weave a cultural texture out of words and melodies, out of thoughts and poetry, in which people can settle, but which today we often dismiss as nebulous illusions, narratives or “biases”, enlightened and secularized, as we try to explain death to ourselves today.

But precisely because of this, according to Aries, we do not keep our own finiteness at bay; all medical and technical progress often only results in the tamed death becoming a feral death – behind drawn curtains, lonely, alone with flashing devices and tubes that are supposed to defend life against dying. In all our knowing and explaining, we ultimately lack what is also found in the text of the Dying Cantata: Faith in something that can give us another form of living certainty, trust in something greater than ourselves – and thus enable a lived habit with a death that will come to us at some point, that will not lose its terror, but that we can bear.

End pieces

Surrounded by all these doubts and probing questions, I remembered the poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Schlussstück,” words that have long been meaningful to me: “Death is great, we are His laughing mouth – when we mean ourselves in the midst of life, He dares to weep, in the midst of us.”

Over twenty years ago, these lines were part of an obituary with which my husband and I tried to say goodbye to a good friend. He had died suddenly, of an infection, supposedly nothing serious – in the middle of life, just become a father, about to get married, his father said at the funeral: “We were all so happy just now.”

I remember how, after his death, I entered for the first time the apartment that was actually so familiar, where we had so often cooked, celebrated and thought about all the important and unimportant things in life. His shoes were still in the hallway, everything seemed the same, and yet there was an emptiness, an absence in those rooms that made everything seem strange, everything so much bigger and me so much smaller.

In the face of death, we are struck by the realization that death is near and yet we cannot grasp it – this knowledge that this nearness does not have to be significant only at the end of a long life suddenly breaks through with full force. We are transient beings, from the moment we are born we are heading towards an end we cannot know. We know the “that” but not the “when.” No one can know “how near my end” is, or how many times I may have been near death. One’s own or that of another loved one with whom we have just sat, “Who knows if today my mouth will not speak the last words?”

This ignorance is ambivalent. It protects us, the idea of a future in which death is still far away helps us to accept life as a precious gift and to fill it with deeds, desires, experiences and goals. And yet, not infrequently, we have to be aware: In the midst of life, death dares to cry within us. This experience is impressive and painful, but it also shakes us awake, makes us aware of the value of life in a different way and sometimes even raises new questions “laughing mouth”.

But how can we bear this tension and uncertainty? How can we love people and make sense, when we dedicate ourselves to these thoughts in all clarity? Meaningless and absurd seems a life that does nothing but end? And yet we are beings full of hope for a good, successful and long life, in which we create something that could remain even if everything comes to an end.

The art of embracing these supposed contradictions and accepting laughter and crying side by side, perhaps even simultaneously, is no easy task, but we are capable of it. We come into the world as finite beings, born into an uncertain future, and the closer we are to that beginning, the more self-evident this knowledge seems: Not only are we finite, but we are also “initial”; every ending holds a beginning, even if we cannot know it. If we talk to children about death, we might be surprised how wise and natural the way these little people and young minds often deal with transience is – they are much less interested in distinguishing between life and death, but know about the conditionality of the two – even if they cannot always put it into words. The fact that tears flow in the process is no reason not to try and – at some point the sun will shine again, as I was able to learn from a 12-year-old thinker. Can we learn to let death into our lives, or rather practice taming it in our own and new way?

To philosophize is to “learn to die.”

The thinker Michel de Montaigne considered philosophy to be the intellectual activity that could help us in this endeavor, that is, actually teach us how to die. In his famous essay “To philosophize is to learn to die”, the philosopher asks: “The goal of our career is death – our eyes are inevitably fixed on it. How, when it strikes fear and terror into our hearts, can we take even one step forward without shuddering?” To this, for Montaigne, there can be only one answer: We must try to invite death to us and thereby take away its terror – this, he said, is the only way not to save ourselves to a redemptive afterlife, but to live a truly good life. But the philosopher did not mean the attitude alluded to in the cantata of being ready to die at any time and living in anticipation of death, but rather to exhaust one’s own life powerfully and presently and yet to listen when death begins to cry in us now and then. To invite him in, even when it hurts and frightens us, like a kind of spiritual “nevertheless”: “Let us rob him of his unearthliness, let us keep company with him, let us become accustomed to him, let us consider nothing so often as him.”

This idea sounds like something we can try. But not everyone agrees with Montaigne on this: The philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch, for example, is firmly convinced in his work “Death” that we “decidedly cannot get used to death.” It always hits us suddenly in all its harshness and in all its preparation. According to Jankélévitch, one’s own finiteness remains one of man’s greatest mortifications.

I, too, am sure: most of us have had experiences in which we were inconsolable and certainly did not want to practice getting used to death. But does that make it synonymous with mortification? Can’t mortification only come from a disappointed expectation, and what exactly can an expectation of life look like? What exactly does life owe us if we may resent its own impermanence? Yes, the end always strikes us unawares, “despite our precautions,” as Jankélévitch points out, but a successful life is not about preventing death, but about the possibility of living with it-without despairing of it forever. It is about finding comfort and support in something that may thereby be a promise, because it goes beyond us and our own lives.

Life in the face of death

And is this not also what Bach is trying to do in his music? To enable consolation in the face of death, not to find words like Rilke or Montaigne, but to use music as a language to create support and forms of expression that allow a “nevertheless” to be imagined and felt. A nonetheless that also lies in questionability, a questionability so radical that it can become a possibility again. A life does not become worthless and meaningless by the fact that it comes to an end at some point. On the contrary, it only lives in this state of tension of coming and going, of beginning and end, and human beings are probably the only beings capable of consciously engaging with this knowledge: Only we live a life in the face of death, if we choose to do so.

At the end of all these reflections there may indeed be the wish, as it says in the cantata, that one’s own end may be a “good” one, for “all’s well that ends well”.

The end of a fulfilled life, in which we are not suddenly torn from our own midst, but a life from which we can take leave – world-weary and life-full – and perhaps no longer have to endure this, but can even want to. I hope, very much, that our friend, who was not at all tired of life and full of the world, and who hoped for a future that was yet to be shaped, was also able to find this peace at that time. A peace that perhaps cannot be an earthly one and that for us, who reflect on it here, is only alive as a question and a possibility. A question we can ask ourselves, together with words and in music – but then we are already on the way to doing exactly what Montaigne wished for so much: To take away the horror of death by inviting it to us – in all the unknowing of the end that will eventually come to us.

This text has been translated with DeepL (www.deepl.com).