Yesterday I was looking at a the copyright page of Dance Dance Dance and under “Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data,” I saw “Murakami, Hakuri, 1949— ” . The “1949— ” gave me a small panic attack. I couldn’t breath right. I couldn’t think straight. The palms of my hands were sweating. (It didn’t help that I was on a plane and we were taking off. I’m always afraid of plane take-offs.)
1949— : Murakami, Hakuri is still alive, but he will die. We don’t know when, but his death is so certain that we put a long dash and left a space after his birth year. And when he dies, we will add the year of death, and the information will be complete. Our job will be done.
We don’t have shelf space for aging, death, and dying. They are so unfashionable. But small signs remind us that deep inside we know the truth. Journalists write obituaries when people are still alive. We make wills. And yet we maintain the illusion that what is true for everybody else will not be true for us. That, as Christopher Hitchens says, God in our case will make an exception. It’s not surprising. The experience of the end, as the experience of the beginning, is something we don’t know anything about.
When it comes to human experience, I have a graphic and unstoppable imagination. When somebody dies, especially if they die in frightening circumstances, I cannot stop myself from imagining how it must have felt. I can feel their fear, hear their screams, think their thoughts, even sense a shadow of their pain in my body. An extreme form of empathy, I suppose.
But this is still experience of living. The final, scary, moments of life. I cannot go beyond the wall of an experience that is no longer life, no longer human.
An interesting situation, if you think about it. We are trapped in this interval between a beginning and an end we don’t know anything about. The end is particularly mysterious. The end is unthinkable. We don’t know when it’s going to come. We don’t know how it’s going to come. We don’t know what will happen (or not happen) thereafter. Yet it belongs to our history and the history of all the people we know.