Death has been on my mind recently. Not my own – that will be the last thing I do.
No, it is the demise of a lady in my extended circle which I have been pondering. It was not a surprise, particularly – age and a range of conditions made it likely that it would happen reasonably soon. The only surprise, perhaps, was that it happened at the exact point it did.
A death requires a funeral, an event about the dead, but for the living. They are a way for the family to display to their tribe their adherence to its mores. The last line of the first work of Western literature reads, “And so they completed the funeral rites of Hector, tamer of horses.” There is a set way of doing things when someone dies, and Priam and the other Trojans have followed it (as do the Greeks and specifically Achilles with Patroclus). Eulogies are a first and, in most cases, a last draft of history, a way for the survivors to set the narrative.
I am not, I confess, an expert on funerals, still being a little too young for them to have become a regular part of my calendar and, to be fair, having missed a few I could reasonably be expected to have attended. I may, therefore, be out of touch but one novelty, I felt, was a table containing mementoes of the deceased. Perhaps this is the way things are done.
But why? Was there some link to the grave goods Egyptians and higher-class Chinese would be buried with? Probably not – Christian metaphysics suggested that the afterlife is a full-board experience – travellers do not need to take their own supplies. Besides, she was cremated.
Did they, instead, function as some sort of relic? Objects for the veneration of the living; the deceased in some way living on in the memories they provoke?
Relics, their collection and veneration, have a long history. Rescuing the Crown of Thorns was priority no. 1 for the firecrews dealing with Notre Dame. The final blow Lampedusa deals to the Salina family in The Leopard is the revelation that few of the holy artefacts on which the sisters have spent much of their inheritance were either holy or, indeed, artefacts.
But relics are a mark of significance. People want a saint’s heelbone, they don’t want an ordinary sinner’s. Alexander and his muleteer may have been “levelled” in death, but discover the former’s ring and you’ll end up on the front page of The Times, discover the latter’s and even an archeological journal might reject your paper.
Thus with the deceased. She was significant to her family (many of them would not be here without her) and to her friends. But Significant? Not really. No statue will be raised to her, no graduate student as yet unborn will comb through her papers in search of a thesis. Her claim to world importance rests on some distant descendent who, for example, unifies quantum physics and Relativity.
In this she is no different to the vast majority of humans who ever have, and ever will live. If outliers were not rare, they would not be outliers.
Funerals are a celebration of a particular life and, as a matter of culture, many argue that we should celebrate her sort of life. The deceased was a good woman by all reasonable standards. She was a devoted wife and mother, regular churchgoer, good friend. She had not pushed the envelope but she had done the right thing. It was, we are often told, the type of life to which we should aspire.
The little things are enough. Family, the occasional good dinner, a nice sunset perhaps, these are the things that matter, the things of which a good life is made. Wanting more is, perhaps, faintly suspicious. If one can be happy with little, why does one need a lot?
Principles, I think, are often just personal preferences we would prefer others to share. As such, they often fail to account for the variability of the human animal. Some people just want different things. Would, Montaigne asks in On The affection of fathers for their Children, Alexander or Caesar have given up their empire for more time with their families? Probably not, he concludes. Their conquests were, to them, their children. Alexander cried when he realised that even if he conquered this world, there was an infinite series of them he would never reach. There are (not many, perhaps) questing spirits whose souls will always run the risk of wearing out their breasts.
And this is a bargain they are willing to make.
Horses for courses, then. Some, content with little will seek little, others dissatisfied with the small will seek satisfaction in pursuit of the large.
But there is an asymmetry. For while Alexander was daring greatly, he could watch a beautiful sunset just as much as the meanest swineherd in Greece. He held great dinner parties (great for him, not always great for all of his guests. Or, indeed, the venue). He too saw the flowers bloom and the trees blossom. If it is the little things in which happiness lies, he wasn’t giving any of them up as he conquered the world.
“Men can be happy in a prison,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, Rome’s most Stoic and (perhaps) most gloomy Emperor. “You can be happy in a palace.” He could hardly believe otherwise. “Very little is needed for a happy life. It is always in yourself, in your way of thinking” his doctrine had taught him.
Whether the Stoics were right, and happiness is just a matter of mental choice, or whether it is created by simple, always available things, it is not something we need ever give up. It is always there for us, not some prize we need to attain, more like a sum of money a contestant on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? locks in which they can never lose. And, of course, on the gameshow, the rational choice is not to settle for the guaranteed prize, it is to ask for the next question.
If we truly believe that happiness lies in the little things, we would bank them and move on.
But often we don’t.
Perhaps because we never really think about it – humans are very good at “knowing” things without necessarily knowing all that they imply. Or perhaps there is a faint dishonesty. For all we claim that it is the little things which bring happiness in general, we believe that, in our specific case, others are necessary too. Our lifestyles, our position in society, our bank balances. Do you think you could lose all those and still take joy in a sunset? Do you believe you would be happy seeing a flower bloom if you lived on your own in a hut?
Probably not. We may claim the little things bring happiness, but we believe they do so only in the context of a series of other things, many of which aren’t little at all.
And that is, perhaps, why we don’t really act as if they are enough and happiness is always available to us. We assume that it is not. At £32,000, a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire carries on because he has nothing to lose. We, by contrast, and despite what we claim, believe we do. So we cash out and say we only wanted £32,000 anyway.
That’s leaving a lot of money on the table. Not just in the gameshow, but in life too. If we understood that there was nothing to lose, that there was a floor below which we could not fall, we would carry on playing. We would see what was round the corner, keep on pushing. No fear, just doing, confidence that, if the little things are enough, we will always have enough, no matter what happens. We may risk greatly, but the sun will still rise and the trees will still bloom and that will be enough. Having nothing to lose, we would have everything to gain.
And we’d have a fuller table at our funerals.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He is now also on Substack, where you are welcome to follow him.
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