A Note on the Walking Dead.

I wrote this post a few days ago and have been reluctant to post it. It’s a bit glum, a bit earnest, and has an air of generalisation about it. But this is a blog not a text book, and its purpose is to give vent to random musings which arise during idle moments. And so I’ve decided to throw it up. I managed to apply my unfathomable sense of humour to the subject of cancelling Christmas yesterday, so why not?

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Something is troubling me more and more lately. It’s difficult to explain, but I feel inclined to try so here goes.

Let me start by repeating my favourite dictum: Perception is the whole of the life experience. I don’t know, any more than anybody else does, whether there is any meaning or purpose to life, but as far as the general prosecution of life is concerned, that dictum would seem to hold true. And what it means is that, in practical terms at least, life effectively consists of nothing more than a flow of experiences.

And so we walk through the tunnel of time, mentally picking the fruits of experience off the seemingly never ending line of trees along the way and devouring them. As each experience slips through our minds it becomes the waste matter of our personal history, at which point we call it a memory. We value memory, pretending that it allows us to re-live the experience. But it doesn’t, not really. We might smile at the memory of something amusing, but the experience itself has gone. (And it’s worth bearing in mind that two or more apparently identical experiences are actually subtly different because they’re each informed by the mood and precise circumstances of their actuality. So once any experience has been consumed, it’s gone forever.)

And so we go through life anticipating the next experience – we look forward to the holidays, the Christmas gathering, the next career promotion, the excitement of a new relationship, the birth of our children or grandchildren, the football match on Saturday, and so on and so forth.

But then the big question comes into play: what happens as we grow older and find the fruit trees of experience growing ever more widely spaced because much, and eventually all, of what we like to do is no longer available to us? Our ageing bodies degrade in so many ways and our ageing minds become slower and duller. And as that inevitability gathers pace, our capacity to act upon our desires and revel in favourable circumstances diminishes proportionately. Our core perceptive faculty might remain keen, but eventually there’s little, if anything, left to perceive.

What price then the value of perception? The thing is, you see, that if perception is the whole of the life experience, it follows that experience itself is life. So when there’s nothing left to experience, we’re dead. No matter what the biologists, the lawyers and the medical fraternity say, life is over.

And that’s why, when I see old people sitting silently and dejectedly in the common room of a care home, not even bothering to watch the trash oozing out of the communal TV set, I realise that a lot of people die long before they stop breathing. And the worst part for me is that I think I can see at least the mirage of such an eventuality looming not too far ahead.