Loss: When the spirit itself falls sick with the illness of death

Source: Lucretius on the mortality of the soul

"Know this too: just as the flesh suffers from every illness,

tormented by pain and sickness, by every affliction and plague,

so too is the spirit visited by: grief, sorrow, and fear –

and therefore bitter death will gather it too in due time.

For with the illness of the body, the spirit too sometimes wanders:

a person's mind becomes deranged, his tongue utters nonsense...

And therefore there is no doubt that the spirit too is mortal [can die],

if the agonies of disease take hold of it too from time to time,

for pain and illness – both are the artisans of death."

Lucretius, "On the Nature of Things", Book 3, lines 460-472, 1st century BCE (Translation: Shlomo Dickman; Image: beginning of the work, manuscript in the Cambridge Library).

Explanation: Materialist freedom: Nothing to fear when there is no one left to fear

The Roman Lucretius, an Epicurean poet and philosopher, presents a jarring materialist view here: there is no immortal soul. Everything we are—our thoughts, feelings, memories—is a temporary product of matter arranged in a certain way, and at death, it all scatters. There is no heaven, no hell, no reward and punishment. There are only atoms meeting for a moment and then parting ways. It is not just the body that fears death; the spirit too is anxious about its own dying. Lucretius writes this not to induce despair, but precisely to liberate: if there is no afterlife, there is nothing to fear. Death is not an event that happens to us—when it is here, we are already gone.

Perspective: The problem with a consolation that is nothing

Lucretius tried to fix things, but ended up making them worse. He argues that if we understand that death is nothing, we will stop fearing it. But that only represses the fundamental insight: we are not afraid of death—we are afraid of the loss of what we leave behind and what we did not get to do. A person on their deathbed is not afraid of the moment they cease to exist. They are afraid of parting from the people they love, of the moments that will never be, of the world continuing without them. Epicurean doctrine says: "Don't worry, you won't feel a thing." But that is precisely what is terrifying—that you won't feel a thing. Losing the capacity to feel is the very definition of loss. Lucretius, in his scientific attempt to reassure us, actually exacerbates the problem: he reminds us that everything we love is temporary, fragile, guaranteed to vanish. And that realization is not liberating—it is paralyzing.

Going Deeper: From the Stoics to alienation: The price of peace of mind

The Stoic tradition, which grew in the wake of Epicureanism, offered a different answer to the same problem. Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, wrote in his Meditations: "Everything is opinion." What we lose is not the thing itself, but our opinion of it, our valuation of it. If we relinquish that opinion—in this case, about life itself—we let go of the pain. But here too lies a problem: relinquishing the opinion that your child is precious to you, or that your partner matters, is emotional detachment, not consolation. Ancient philosophy in Greece and India, preoccupied with the pursuit of ataraxia (tranquility, an unshakeable peace of mind), offered tools that work only if you are willing to pay the price: living a life of distant alienation from yourself and others, never attaching yourself to anything, so that you never suffer the pain of parting.

Culture: Sardanapalus and the beauty of self-destruction

Eugène Delacroix's 1827 painting The Death of Sardanapalus captures a moment of total loss: the Assyrian king Sardanapalus (a legendary figure described by the Greek writer Ctesias) watches the destruction of his entire world—his palace set ablaze, his concubines and horses slaughtered, his treasures scattered—while he continues to torment women in a drunken stupor. Sardanapalus keeps good company with figures from the ancient and literary worlds, like King Zimri (1 Kings 16), Emperor Nero, Denethor in The Lord of the Rings, and Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick, who preferred an aesthetic, clean death over wrestling with fate. In our own time, there is Bashar al-Assad, who, as his country was being overrun by terrorists, invited his friends' wives to his palace and played Angry Birds in his spare time.

The painting is saturated with intense colors, chaotic motion, and erotic violence. Sardanapalus reclines on his bed, watching it all with strange detachment—like a man who realized that if everything is doomed to destruction, then ownership itself is meaningless. This is an extreme Lucretian response: if everything is temporary, why not destroy it all with your own hands, if only to cut short the time of loss?

Out of respect for our audience, we will not display the painting, and in its place is Shay-Lee Atari's song, "In Our Garden."