T he copper beech.
Something stupendous in trees comes from their solidity, their quiet "thereness." The thick, horny, supple hide of the bark, the zen sibilance of the leaves in wind, the spines of branches grazing the sky, all remind of what we are not now: rooted, continuous, fleshed out and arching upwards. Compared to the mayfly quality of our lives, trees are the closest cousin we have to immortality and eternity, a shuttle for Lachesis' thread of life on a loom much larger and longer-lived than ourselves.
From the library I could watch the huge copper beech from an air-conditioned distance. The tree reminds one of nothing so much as an explosion in freeze-frame. Its dark hueless leaves spill out in rough sharp-eaved parabolas while its trunk spews upward in grey silence a splay of splined branches. From where I sit the tree is perfect, harmony, the roiling symmetry of its presence soothing my jangled asymmetrical nerves.
Then I left the library to stand underneath it and hear, in the echo chamber of my imagination, what it might be saying to me, wanting, of course, to hear about longevity and permanence. But the grey convoluted trunk is splitting in places. Some branches, small ones to be sure, had no leaves, the tributaries dried out. Above me other branches, broken off by wind or intrepid climbers, hung like rabbits in a butcher's shop, waiting for entropy to make a meal of them. The knuckled roots were still strong, spiked into the ground with the force of an irrefutable argument, yet it came clear to me then, as it should have been clear to me all along save for my misty romanticism, that even this magnificent spasm of life will, too, pass away into forgetfulness and disheveled anarchy, no different and no stronger than any mayfly of the moment.
I am always surprised when, in the midst of my machinations for happiness, the obvious boxes my ears, that I will die without choice in the matter. I am not especially depressed by that fact; I see no brutality or denigration in it. On the contrary, it is probably the greatest spur we have to live a full and decent life. Like Thoreau, we should not want to find out that when we come to die we had not lived. The only way, then, to insure that that doesn't happen is to live as if death were imminent; or, as the character in the movie Breaker Morant says, "Live every day as if it were your last, because one day you'll be right."
Death puts a gloss on everything in a way an afterlife cannot. If you believe that some god will take care of you in an eternal day-care center (see Twain's Letters from the Earth about this), then you've no particular impulse to make the best of this life because, by god, you've got an eternity waiting for you just around the corner. Even if there be an afterlife, I think we should forget about it, not only because we have no idea if it is better or worse than the life we now have, but also because it devalues the life you have now by allowing you to skim like a water-skater over the fearsomely beautiful depths of the pond.
But if you don't allow an exemption for an afterlife, you will find that the world around you is suddenly more precious because of the precarious waltz you are sharing with it. Most of us do not look closely enough at the world around us, do not really see anything. Oh, we get fleeting light images across our retina, like irritating itches, and we associate these with things we know. But we never really inspect things in all their detail, in all their "thereness." To do so takes work, and most of us are lazy. To do so takes patience, and most of us are in a hurry. To do so takes humor, and most of us are dour and tired. Think of all the animals that have died for you, all the paper made, asphalt laid, buildings erected, plants grown. Think of all the innumerable connections that bind you to everything else, how, in one way, you are the center of a universe of messages transmitted and received. Think of all this, and more, and an afterlife will pale into the airiness that it really is. This life, substantial, painful, intricately marvelous, is our only stomping ground; we are responsible for making whatever wine of happiness or bitterness we drink in this life.
What about the fear, you say. I can say nothing about that. Ernest Becker has eloquently spoken about this fear in his Denial of Death, the "worm in the apple" as he calls it. The fear of leaving the known, the death of our fantastic brain, the complete and utter absence of our selves from the hands of the earth -- all this we try to deny, which leads some to sickness, some to religion, some to existential rebellion, and some to happiness. It seems to me that the fear one feels is proportional to the life one doesn't lead. A person who tries to live his life so fully that he can have no regrets, or at least only minor ones, on his deathbed is a person who is not afraid to die because he knows what he has seen, knows to the lees the endless repetitiveness and variety of life, and thus has had his curiosity satisfied again and again. It is only when we are timid, when we refuse to reach out into the life around us, when we hold back from plunging into the stream, that the fear becomes magnified. Because it is in reality two fears: one, that you will not have lived a full life when you die; two, that when you die you will not have a chance to live a full life. The only antidote to this is to live; the only cure for the fear of death is more life.