A Story for All Souls
We all must die.
No matter how common this truth, it is still brutal in brevity—more like a grim sentence than a grammatical sentence. How one confronts it makes all the difference. Some confront it with John Donne’s sonnet, “Death Be Not Proud.” Others share St. John’s vision: “And behold a pale horse, and he that sat upon him, his name was Death, and hell followed him.” Whether serene or screaming, we all play Hamlet:
…To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to dream; aye, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.
At this dying time of year, human thoughts and liturgies turn toward the departed; and hence, the human obligation to die:
What is the purpose of life?
What occurs after death?
Such existential meditations are central in Leo Tolstoy’s writings; and perhaps never presented with such emotional, fearful force as in his short work, The Death of Ivan Ilych. A source of this novella’s power lies in the fact that its conflicts and revelations reflect Tolstoy’s own in many ways.
One night, at a country inn in Arzamas, Tolstoy had a life-changing experience. He felt assured that Death was present within the house. The incident actually drove the writer to mental prostration, spurring him to the study of religion and doctrines of death to overcome his dread of mortality. Ultimately, he rejected Boethian consolations of philosophy and Biblical fortifications of faith in favor of the simple worldview of the Russian rustic, whose honest acceptance of death bore the wisdom of ages.
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