'We Are the Mere Passing Guests of Time'

The final essay in The Hall of Uselessness, the collection Simon Leys published a few years before his death in 2014, is titled “Memento Mori.” Two of my friends died that year, one of whom I met in 1970. He was a lawyer. We spoke infrequently but every time one of us called the other, I would laugh until I wept and my ribs hurt. The other friend I had known for only six years. We too laughed a lot but mostly we talked about books. He was a teacher and critic. Both were my age, and both died of cancer. None of this is remarkable. If you live long enough – I’m sixty-six – the deaths of friends and relatives accumulate until your name is added to the list and you are remembered or forgotten.

When I encounter the phrase “memento mori,” I think first of Muriel Spark’s 1959 novel. Then of Philippe de Champaigne’s painting Vanitas (c. 1671), with its three objects signifying life, death and time. And then a passage in Part 1, Sec. XLV of Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici:

“Whosoever enjoys not this life, I count him but an apparition, though he wear about him the sensible affections of flesh. In these moral acceptions, the way to be immortal is to die daily; nor can I think I have the true theory of death, when I contemplate a skull or behold a skeleton with those vulgar imaginations it casts upon us. I have therefore enlarged that common memento mori into a more Christian memorandum, memento quatuor novissima [“remember the four last things”],--those four inevitable points of us all, death, judgment, heaven, and hell.”

Even a nonbeliever is chastened by such things. To claim otherwise is bluster. Leys’ associations with memento mori are different. He cites none of these things but begins with Swift’s Struldbruggs, moves on to Albert Speer and Ivan Turgenev, the French surgeon and biologist Alexis Carrel, Evelyn Waugh, Tolstoy and William Blake. As is customary with Leys, one doesn’t confuse his citations with obnoxious namedropping. He is confident enough to associate casually with the great men who have moved among us (not that Speer was great). Leys reminds us that memory is an obligation:

“We never cease to be astonished at the passing of time: ‘Look at him! Only yesterday, it seems, he was still a tiny kid, and now he is bald, with a big moustache; a married man and a father!’ This shows clearly that time is not our natural element: would a fish ever be surprised by the wetness of water? For our true motherland is eternity; we are the mere passing guests of time. Nevertheless, it is within the bonds of time that man builds the cathedral of Chartres, paints the Sistine Chapel and plays the seven-string zither – which inspired William Blake’s luminous intuition: ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time.’”