We cannot control time, of course. Mysteriously, though, we do seem capable of … (grasping for a good metaphor) … convincing it to take a different route, or eluding it for a short while. One of my favorite poems emphatically declares “Love’s not Time’s fool.” I first read that poem as a junior in high school, but I’ve never forgotten that arresting metaphor: true lovers are not subject to the erosive power of time.
Now, don’t take that too far. The human body is subject to time; that’s beyond dispute, whether or not you’re a true lover or a false lover, warmonger or pacifist. We know this without having to exhume the contents of any grave for empirical proof; we see and feel the dint of Time long before we die. Our mirror and pictures remind us of it; our doctor visits, too. Time scribbles lines on our faces and hands. Time augments gravity: we begin to sag. We wind down. We age.
And if a body is all a lover is, then Time most certainly wins, and the poet is most definitely wrong. According to this view, the poet wrote the poem at all not because he had proof that what he said of love is true, but because he lacked proof; the poem is simply his artful way of assuaging an uneasy conscience. But is a lover more than a body? The question is important, for its answer either crowns Time and its cohort Death, or else dethrones them. This is to say that a life lived in light of the one answer radically differs from a life lived in light of the other.
Here’s why. If a lover is nothing more than a body, and if all bodies end in decay and dust, then love also ends in decay and dust. The grandest hope that one living by this answer can have is that one’s body will last a long time, and even this hope ends in the dust with the body that bears it, for if a lover is nothing more than a body, then surely a hoper can be nothing more. Lovers and hopers of this stripe will seek to assuage their conscience with variations of the notion that, as can be heard sung in The Lion King, death is simply part of the “circle of life.” Surely this notion is a cheap comfort to those of the Body-Only camp, for the comfort it offers is not that you (or your beloved) will continue on after death, but that your decaying bodies will be useful in sustaining other animate things—I guess things such as plants and the animals that eat them, and, by extension, the humans that eat animals and plants. The notion is meant to make you feel happy for the living by distracting you from the fact that you will not be among them one day. And that is exactly the way Body-Only subscribers must live their whole life—as if distracting themselves from the truth (to which they subscribe) of their own permanent dissolution. For them, life must be one big game of trying to believe that a segment (a line that begins and ends) is a circle and that that’s not so bad because I am a “participant” in a cycle.
But a life lived in light of the other belief—that lovers are more than bodies—do not have to play that game of self-distraction. Lovers and hopers of this stripe see the “end” as being well past the grave. They think of something’s end in an Aristotelian sense—its purpose—and, therefore, do not talk of the grave as an end in the same way that a train line “ends,” for that would be to exalt death as the grand purpose (or destination) of all our loves and hopes and dreams. And to do that is to live so narrowly as to be lying in our narrow bed already, six feet under. But who wants to live like that?
Oh, I’m not naïve. I know that Body-Only subscribers celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, want to see their grandkids grow up and spend time with them, tend to their homes and care for their yards, appreciate walks on the beach and hikes in the mountains, express condolences at funerals, and so on. I know they say they are happy. But they will have to admit—unless they amend their belief—that all their appreciation and care and joy and fellowship, and the objects in which they placed them, have no more value—because no more meaning—than the dirt on which they walk, for the grave turns all to dust. Including their papery happiness.
I’m afraid the only convincing proof (to me) that lovers are more than bodies is that they long for their love to continue. They may be happy now in their beloved’s arms—surely they avow so—but they feel something like insulted to think that, if this world is all there is, they can conceive of a happiness that outlasts it. Why should that thought enter their minds? Why are some lovers not content to “participate” in an endless cycle of chemical reclamation? I am reminded suddenly of a scene in Brave New World where one of its inhabitants boasts that even the dead are “useful” to the State because after their cremation “a kilo and a half of phosphorus per adult corpse” gets harvested for use as fertilizer. This is not, however, the kind of continuation the devout lover desires! Not this lover, anyway. I get no joy from thinking about the chemical usefulness of either my beloved’s body or my own, after death. Why should I dance about that? I may as well throw a block party for the useful pile of chickenshit that facilitated the growth of my dad’s tomato plants. “Have some respect for the dead,” a Body-Only subscriber will say. But why? Both my respect and your disapproval will end in the grave with our bodies. If that’s all we are.
I want a different kind of continuation. I want to recognize my beloved’s face again, to share a laugh over a familiar joke, to share a tear over a remembered loss, to share a victorious smile over our graves. I want to see our bodies reconstituted again that we might embrace again. I cannot love my beloved’s molecules as I love her. That’s like saying I’m just as comfortable and at home among disparate sheets of plywood and sheetrock and stacks of two-by-fours as I am in my house. That’s absurd. In short, nothing in this world can adequately explain to me why I feel this way, why I have this longing.
So. If I must one day watch my loved ones be lowered slowly, stately, into the ground, I will try to remember that I am watching the simplest act of a gardener. A hole has been dug, a seed has been lowered into it, earth has been pushed into the hole again, covering the seed. The rains come. The sun broadcasts its light. And we wait. “I wonder if any green tip has peeped through,” we think and go out to look at the ground. “Ah. Not yet.” And we wait some more. “What about today? I’m sure it’s getting close.” We look again, but not yet. And thus the cycle of wonder continues, until one day …
The very same drama closes the movie Gladiator. The camera zooms-in on a pair of hands digging a small hole in the dirt. Freeze frame. Whose hands are these? Could they be those of the hero, Maximus, preparing to plant something on his farm in the afterlife? After all, we did see his hand up-close in the very beginning as it caressed the heads of wheat growing on his land; also, we saw him die and enter through the door into the next life, back to his family and land. But no, these hands here are darker than Maximus’. Then the camera cuts to the face of Juba, an African gladiator who befriended Maximus and fought by his side in all the hero’s trials except his last. Ah, so the hands are Juba’s. His hands, too, were shown up-close much earlier, when he helps to stave-off infection from a severe gash on Maximus’ shoulder: we see his hands packing the wound with maggots. He was helping the hero in his own way then; and now, at the very end, he is helping him again, in his own way. He places in the hole tiny figurines of Maximus’ wife and son—small wood-carvings that the hero held precious; he prayed to them regularly—and then covers them with dirt. Juba pats the dirt, looks up to the sky—and we now see that he stands in an empty, unused coliseum—and says, smiling, “I will see you again. But not yet. Not yet!”
Juba speaks the truth. He may not be able to explain what he says, but that is not my concern here. My concern is that he intuits what every true lover longs for—reunion, a returning to (even an improvement of) the good we knew before death got in the way. He misses Maximus, yes. But he knows that love is not time’s fool and distills that truth into the most succinct pagan version of the Christian’s hope, the greatest declaration of love: not yet! In this he does not deny his death; he denies its preeminence. More life must be lived in the now before more can be lived in the future. Juba’s creed is not a comprehensive statement of the gospel, but it is consonant with it. A time for reunion is coming, but until I resign from time, until I lie in rest, I hope to say, not yet.