The Trinocular: In Touch with the Great Outside

It’s cold and flu season. There’s a bronchial illness going around so powerful that my partner, who in the thirteen years we’ve been together I’ve never seen sick more than a day or two, has been sick for over a week. Cold and flu season is like a tincture of death. If you don’t get seriously ill, it’s an immune system reboot and a shivering little reminder that winter is coming. The body’s impermanence is permanent, Ray Kurzweil and his ilk notwithstanding. Kurzweil has said that he has “a very good chance of living indefinitely.” For the immortalists, or “longevists” mortality itself is a kind of illness in need of a cure: its extension. What David Benatar asks in The Human Predicament is, if life itself is bad, why would it be a good thing to extend it? While we can have meaning for one another, Benatar feels certain that life has no inherent meaning cosmically speaking. For him this makes life and death equally bad. If life is bad, so is death, because by it we are annihilated. But because death is not worse than, but only as bad as life  (“death is the second jaw of our existential vise”), more life cannot be the solution.

Benatar is very conscious that his pessimism will be found by most to be depressing, that it’s not a favorable market for what he’s peddling. I find his argument (perhaps perversely) amusing, though I disagree with it. Right where Benatar finds meaninglessness is where it seems to me meaningfulness begins. Just as courageously facing impermanence might bring about what Roshi Joan Halifax calls “positive disintegration” so acknowledging the ways that suffering inheres to life is the only way to begin to alleviate it.

The Buddhist image for suffering, from the Pali, is dukkha. It refers to an axle that is not centered in its wheel, an ill fit that causes bumpy rides, over-turnings, catastrophes, from the Greek kata “down” and strephein “turn.” In ancient Greek drama, catastrophe is the word for a fatal turning point, a reversal of fortune. Nowadays, dramas that hope to describe contemporaneity can’t confine themselves to just the one cata/strophe. There are too many going on at once, and all of them matter.

Take the unusual show Years & Years. At the most basic level, it’s as familiar a TV show as can be: its about a family, which means its about a group of people sitting around a dinner table, getting together for holidays, going through the various rites of passage and ceremonies of life and death. Its unusual-ness is two-pronged. For one thing, much...