Civilization: The West and the Rest Read Free Page A

reconstructing past thought, I have tried always to remember a simple truth about the past that the historically inexperienced are prone to forget. Most people in the past either died young or expected to die young, and those who did not were repeatedly bereft of those they loved, who did die young. Consider the case of my favourite poet, the Jacobean master John Donne, who lived to the age of fifty-nine, thirteen years older than I am as I write. A lawyer, a Member of Parliament and, after renouncing the Roman Catholic faith, an Anglican priest, Donne married for love, as a result losing his job as secretary to his bride’s uncle, Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. † In the space of sixteen impecunious years, Anne Donne bore her husband twelve children. Three of them, Francis, Nicholas and Mary, died before they were ten. Anne herself died after giving birth to the twelfth child, which was stillborn. After his favourite daughter Lucy had died and he himself had very nearly followed her to the grave, Donne wrote his
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
(1624), which contains the greatest of all exhortations to commiserate with the dead: ‘Any man’s
death
diminishes
me
, because I am involved in
Mankinde
; And therefore never send to know for whom the
bell
tolls; It tolls for
thee
.’ Three years later, the death of a close friend inspired him to write ‘A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day’:
    Study me then, you who shall lovers be
    At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
    For I am every dead thing,
    In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
    For his art did express
    A quintessence even from nothingness,
    From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
    He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot
    Of absence, darkness, death – things which are not.
     
    Everyone should read these lines who wants to understand better the human condition in the days when life expectancy was less than half what it is today.
    The much greater power of death to cut people off in their prime not only made life seem precarious and filled it with grief. It also meant that most of the people who built the civilizations of the past were young when they made their contributions. The great Dutch-Jewish philosopher Baruch or Benedict Spinoza, who hypothesized that there is only a material universe of substance and deterministic causation, and that ‘God’
is
that universe’s natural order as we dimly apprehend it and nothing more, died in 1677 at the age of forty-four, probably from the particles of glass he had inhaled doing his day-job as a lens grinder. Blaise Pascal, the pioneer of probability theory and hydrodynamics and the author of the
Pensées
, the greatest of all apologias for the Christian faith, lived to be just thirty-nine; he would have died even younger had the road accident that reawakened his spiritual side been fatal. Who knows what other great works these geniuses might have brought forth had they been granted the lifespans enjoyed by, for example, the great humanists Erasmus (sixty-nine) and Montaigne (fifty-nine)? Mozart, composer of the most perfect of all operas,
Don Giovanni
, died when he was just thirty-five. Franz Schubert, composer of the sublime String Quintet in C (D956), succumbed, probably to syphilis, at the age of just thirty-one. Prolific though they were, what else might they have composed if they had been granted the sixty-three years enjoyed by the stolid Johannes Brahms or the even more exceptional seventy-two years allowed the ponderous Anton Bruckner? The Scots poet Robert Burns, who wrotethe supreme expression of egalitarianism, ‘A Man’s a Man for A’ That’, was thirty-seven when he died in 1796. What injustice, that the poet who most despised inherited status (‘The rank is but the guinea’s stamp, / The Man’s the gowd [gold] for a’ that’) should have been so much outlived by the poet who most revered it: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who died bedecked with honours at