The Flame of Life [What Does a Pragmatist Turn to When Facing Death?]

In an essay titled “Pragmatism and Romanticism” I tried to restate the argument of Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry.” I wrote there that at the heart of Romanticism is the claim that reason can only follow paths that the imagination has first broken. No words, no reasoning. No imagination, no new words. No such words, no moral or intellectual progress.

I ended that essay by contrasting the poet’s ability to provide us with a richer language with the philosopher’s attempt to attain a non-linguistic access to the really real. The dream of such access was, in Plato’s case, itself a great literary achievement. We are now more able than Plato to accept our finitude—to admit that we shall never be in touch with something greater and more powerful than ourselves. We hope instead that, as the centuries go by, human life here on earth will become richer because the language used by our remote descendants will have more resources. Our vocabulary will stand to theirs as that of our primitive ancestors stands to ours.

In that essay, as in previous writings, I used the word “poetry” in an extended sense. I stretched Harold Bloom’s term “strong poet” to cover prose writers who had invented new language games for us to play—people like Plato, Newton, Marx, Darwin, and Freud, as well as versifiers like Milton and Blake. These games might involve mathematical equations, or inductive arguments, or dramatic narratives, or (in the case of the versifiers) prosodic innovations. But the distinction between prose and verse was irrelevant to my philosophical purposes.

Shortly after I finished writing “Pragmatism and Romanticism,” I was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer. A few months after hearing this bad news, I was having coffee with my elder son and a visiting cousin. My cousin (who is a Baptist minister) asked me whether my thoughts had turned to religious topics, and I said no. “Well, what about philosophy?” my son asked. “No,” I replied, neither the philosophy I had written nor the philosophy I had read seemed to have any bearing on my situation. I had no quarrel with Epicurus’s argument that the fear of death is irrational, or with Heidegger’s claim that onto-theology is rooted in the attempt to evade mortality. But neither ataraxia (freedom from disturbance) nor Being and Time (Being-towards-death) seemed to fit.

“Haven’t you read anything that has been of any use?” my son persisted. “Yes,” I said, and the word “poetry” slipped out of my mouth. “Which poems?” he asked. I quoted two hackneyed poems that I had recently dredged up from the depths of my memory, and which had oddly cheered me up: the much-quoted lines from Swinburne’s “The Garden of Proserpine”:

We thank with brief thanksgiving

Whatever gods may be

That no life lives for ever;

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.

And also Landor’s “On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday”:

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;

Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art;

I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life;

It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

I found solace in those slow meanderings and the glow of the half-burnt coals. I doubt such an effect could have been produced by [reading] prose. Not only imagery, but rhyme and rhythm were needed to create this effect. In such verses, all three factors conspire to create a degree of concision and impact that only poetry can achieve. Compared to the disciplined assaults crafted by poets, even the best prose is diffuse and slovenly.

Although various pieces of poetry have been deeply meaningful to me at particular moments in life, I myself have never been able to write a poem (except, of course, for the sonnets I wrote during tedious faculty meetings—which were more a form of doodling). Nor do I follow the works of contemporary poets. Whenever I read a poem, I usually choose [pieces] from my favorite poems of adolescence. I think my hesitant and ambivalent relationship with poetry, in this narrower sense of the word, is the result of the Oedipal complexities of having a poet for a father. (See James Rorty, Children of the Sun (Macmillan, 1926).)

At any rate, I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such [inexpressible] truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. It is [my wish] rather because, if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts, I would have lived more fully—just as I would have lived more fully if I had made more close friends. Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human than those with poorer ones—further removed from the animals. Individual men and women partake more richly of human life when their memories are stocked with verses.

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The Fire of Life

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The Flame of Life [What Does a Pragmatist Turn to When Facing Death?]

Author: Richard Rorty

Translator: Be'sat Elmi

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