Finding hope in one's finitude

THIS WEEK’S WINNER

MANILA, Philippines - Jasmin C. Ibañez, 27, is an English teacher at Ateneo de Manila High School. “Though I am quite satisfied with my job there are times when I dream of becoming something else even if I neither have the experience nor the courage to be any of the following: an ecologist, a radio DJ, a scholar, a mountaineer, a stage actress, a poet, and a vocalist of a rock band.”

I am not even beyond my 30s, and yet I feel my years are ending. I have this constant fear that, any time soon, my knees will be weakened by arthritic spasms as I try to walk the remaining steps to work, my heart’s rhythm will slowly fade as I swim my last lap, or my memory will forever be lost in a dark cloud as I try to recover childhood memories crowded with faces that once mattered.

All of us, I’m sure, know of people who have suffered such or even more cruel fates, and while there are those whose resolve to live life as they desire is strengthened by this inevitability we all face, there are those, like me, whose fear is only heightened by this awareness. In my ever-faltering optimism about human life, I tend to view all my actions — enjoying a night out with my friends, checking bundles of test papers, traveling to new destinations — as a step closer to death.

This dread that I feel is eloquently described in one of the passages in John Banville’s novel The Infinities; in this passage, Hermes, the narrator, speculates on what the dog Rex sees in the actions of his masters: “(Human beings) are afraid of something, something that is always there though they pretend it is not. It is the same for all of them, the same huge terrible thing, except for the very young, though even in their eyes, too, (Rex) sometimes fancies he detects a momentary widening, a sudden horrified dawning.”

Perhaps because I am not so young anymore, this “huge terrible thing” has already begun to take shape in my view. To help me cope with and find hope amid our immutable condition, I turn to literature whose frighteningly accurate depiction of life can give voice to and can also challenge my fears. 

The Infinities features the interwoven voices of Old Adam, a preeminent mathematician who suffers from a stroke and becomes a vegetable, and Hermes, the messenger of the gods who sometimes accompanies the dead to the underworld. Old Adam’s looming death becomes a source of tension in the lives of his wife and children, who are completely unaware of Hermes’ and his father Zeus’ intrusion into their lives which, surprisingly, leads to a redemptive end.

Hermes’ all-knowing perspective allows him to describe the characters’ inner fears and doubts and occasional triumphs and to narrate distant memories that shape who they are. His ability to read into the characters’ actions, including his own father’s cunning transformations to act on his lustful desires for Old Adam’s daughter-in-law, magnifies the power of an infinite being, which stands in stark contrast against the finitude of man as symbolized by Old Adam’s anticipated death. Old Adam’s mind, however, soars beyond the space where his body is confined; his lucid mind gives voice to stories of his past involving the limits of his success as a mathematician and the doubts he has about his ability to love. His narration sometimes blurs with Hermes’ as if Old Adam were an immortal being, too — a comforting view on our frailties as humans since this narrative style implies that, even in death or in the painful process of dying, one does not really lose one’s voice which helps give form to his personal stories. These stories are what make up life, and in telling and retelling them (an opportunity Banville gives his main character), one assures its continuity.

While we human beings aspire for our stories and for our lives, to continue ad infinitum, the gods desire an end, as Hermes wisely points out when he analyzes Zeus’s hunger for the flesh, because of the tiresome lives they lead. Their very nature limits them from feeling love and fully engaging as purely themselves in an act of passion where lovers “excuse each other their failings, their sweats and smells, their lies and subterfuges….”

Hermes seems to remind us that living forever does not satiate all yearnings, thereby affirming the value of our lives no matter how short they last and no matter how mundane our preoccupations are. Because we are capable of loving, a value that encompasses all other human virtues, our lives gain meaning.

Much like Old Adam, I don’t feel confident about my knowledge (and experience) of this rather trite, but significant and real, concept. Old Adam, still on his deathbed, muses, “It is very puzzling. Love, the kind that I mean, would require a superhuman capacity for sacrifice and self-denial, such as a saint possesses, or a god….Perhaps that is my trouble, perhaps my standards are too high. Perhaps human love is simple, and therefore beyond me, due to my incurable complicating bent.”

My incomprehension, however, does not come from my tendency to make things more difficult than they are. Rather, it comes from my long-standing habit of gazing inwards — always looking out only for myself to remain comfortable, abruptly avoiding the eyes of the Other whose gaze tells me I am responsible for his or her future.

Despite the dying man’s admission that he does not understand this fundamental virtue, he immediately adds, “And yet perhaps I do love without knowing it; could such a thing be possible, an unwilled, and unconscious loving?” It is this same question that I ask as I try to make my existence matter and as I try to skirt dangers — real or imaginary — to try to preserve what is left of my years.

My ponderings, I’m certain, will not lead me to absolute answers before I reach my end, so I shall find solace in artfully written and insightful stories such as The Infinities, whose final scene — with Old Adam finally awake and with his daughter-in-law carrying a new life within her — leaves a hopeful message: life continues on in our “mortal world” where we “may live, however briefly, however tenuously…solitary and at the same time together somehow here in this place, dying as (we) may be and yet fixed for ever in a luminous, unending instant.”