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“Twenty years is a long time even for an emortal when you’re more than a hundred years old, Mort,” Marna Sajda told me, when I turned to her for comfort. “It’s time for you to move on.” I would of course have turned to Mama Eulalie had my options not narrowed when she died in 2634.
“That’s what Sharane said,” I told Mama Sajda, in a slightly accusatory tone. “She was being sternly reasonable at the time. I thought that the ster
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” she replied, tersely.
Had I been in a less fragile mood, I wouldn’t have been able to say that I was surprised either, but that wasn’t the point, as I tried hard to explain. I was convinced, perhaps foolishly, that Mama Eulalie would have understood.
“I’m truly sorry,” Mama Sajda said, when I was eventually reduced to tears.
“She said that too,” I was quick to point out, not caring that I was piling up evidence to back Sharane’s claim that I had an i
Now that forgetfulness has blotted out the greater part of that phase of my life—including, I presume, the worst of it—I don’t really know why I was so devastated by Sharane’s decision or why it should have filled me with such black despair. Had I cultivated a dependence so absolute that it seemed irreplaceable, or was it only my pride that had suffered a sickening blow? Was it the imagined consequences of the rejection or merely the rejection itself that hurt me so badly?
Mama Sajda wanted to help, but only for a week or two. Mama Eulalie had added injury to Sharane’s insult by dying mere years before I had the greatest need of her. She had been 257 years old and had outlasted not only Papa Nahum, who had been born two years after her, but also Mama Meta, who had been seven years younger. Even so, she had not lasted long enough.None of my other co-parents had come to Mama Eulalie’s funeral. Their association with her was too far in the past. Raising me had ceased to be a defining experience for them. I didn’t hold it against them. I figured that none of them was likely to be around for another twenty years, although I’d never have guessed that Mama Siorane would be the last to go, frozen on the crest of a Titanian mountain, looking up at the rings of Saturn. She was the only one who didn’t actually have a funeral, but even I didn’t go to Papa Ezra’s. I was still Earth-bound, reluctant to lose what people like Mama Siorane had begun to refer to as my “gravirginity.”
When I said my last good-bye to Mama Sajda in 2647, too close for spiritual comfort to the place at which I’d failed to save Grizel from drowning in the treacherous Kwarra, I said my last good-bye to that whole phase in my life: to the tattered remnants of childhood, the bitter legacies of first love, and the patiently accepted hardships of apprenticeship. The second part of my History of Deathwas launched the following year, and I was possessed by a strong sense of begi
I was maturing by degrees, but I still had not served the full term of my apprenticeship.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The second part of The History of Deathwas entitled Death in the Ancient World.It plotted a convoluted but not particularly original trail through the Labyrinth, collating a wealth of data regarding burial practices and patterns of mortality in Egypt, the Kingdoms of Sumer and Akkad, the Indus civilizations of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, the Yangshao and Lungshan cultures of the Far East, the cultures of the Olmecs and Zapotees, and so on. It extended as far as Greece before and after Alexander and the begi
The commentary I provided for Death in the Ancient Worldwas far more extensive than the commentary I had superimposed on the first volume. It offered an unprecedentedly elaborate analysis of the mythologies of life after death developed by the cultures under consideration. Although I have revised the commentary several times over and extended it considerably, I think the original version offered valuable insights into the eschatology of the Egyptians, rendered with a certain eloquence. I spared no effort in my descriptions and discussions of tomb texts, the Book of the Dead, the Hall of Double Justice, Anubis and Osiris, the custom of mummification, and the building of pyramid tombs. I refused to consider such elaborate efforts made by the living on behalf of the dead to be foolish or unduly lavish.
Whereas some historians had insisted on seeing pyramid building as a wasteful expression of the appalling vanity of the world’s first tyrant-dictators, I saw it as an entirely appropriate recognition of the appalling impotence of all humans in the face of death. In my view, the building of the pyramids should not be explained away as a kind of gigantic folly or as a way to dispose of the energies of the peasants when they were not required in harvesting the bounty of the fertile Nile; such heroic endeavor could only be accounted for if one accepted that pyramid building was the most useful of all labors. It was work directed at the glorious imposition of human endeavor upon the natural landscape. The placing of a royal mummy, with all its accoutrements, in a fabulous geometric edifice of stone was a loud, confident, and entirely appropriate statement of humanity’s invasion of the empire of death.
I did not see the pharaohs as usurpers of misery, elevating the importance of their own extinction far above that of their subjects but rather as vessels for the horror of the entire community. I saw a pharaoh’s temporal power not as a successful example of the exercise of brute force but as a symbol of the fact that no privilege a human society could extend or create could insulate its beneficiaries from mortality and mortality’s faithful handmaidens, disease and pain. The pyramids, I contended, had not been built for the pharaohs alone but for everyone who toiled in their construction or in support of the constructors; what was interred within a pyramid was no mere bag of bones absurdly decked with useless possessions but the collective impotence of a race, properly attended by symbolic expressions of fear, anger, and hope.
I still think that there was much merit in the elaborate comparisons that I made between late Egyptian and late Greek accounts of the “death adventure,” measuring both the common and distinctive phases of cultural development in the narrative complication and anxiety that infected their burgeoning but crisis-ridden civilizations. I am still proud of my careful decoding of the conceptual geography of the Greek Underworld and the characters associated with it as judges, guardians, functionaries, and misfortunate victims of hubris.
I disagreed, of course, with those analysts who thought hubris a bad thing and argued for the inherent and conscious irony of its description as a sin. Those who disputed the rights of the immortal gods, and paid the price, were in my estimation the true heroes of myth, and it was in that context that I offered my own account of the meaning and significance of the crucial notion of tragedy. My accounts of the myth of Persephone, the descent of Orpheus, and the punishments inflicted upon the likes of Sisyphus, Ixion, and Tantalus hailed those inventions as magnificent early triumphs of the creative imagination.
The core argument of Death in the Ancient Worldwas that the early evolution of myth making and storytelling had been subject to a rigorous process of natural selection, by virtue of the fact that myth and narrative were vital weapons in the war against death. That war had still to be fought entirely in the mind of man because there was little yet to be accomplished by defiance of death’s claims upon the body. The great contribution of Hippocrates to the science of medicine—which I refused to despise or diminish for its apparent slightness—was that the wise doctor would usually do nothing at all, admitting that the vast majority of attempted treatments only made matters worse.