"Thanatopsis"

Neuschwanstein Castle was designed and built on a romantic pseudo-medieval Wagnerian theme by the “mad” King Ludwig II of Bavaria. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

The once-famous poem “Thanatopsis” (roughly, “a reflection on death,” from the Greek thanatos (“death”) and opsis (“view,” “sight”), by the American poet William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), concludes as follows:

So live, that when thy summons comes to join

The innumerable caravan, which moves

To that mysterious realm, where each shall take

His chamber in the silent halls of death,

Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,

Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed

By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,

Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch

About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

I don’t share his view of death as silence or a “sleep,” common though that view has been and is. But I do think that the poem’s notion of reflecting on death, on one’s own inevitably approaching demise, is a good one. Not to do it constantly, or as escapism, or in a gloomy or morbid or macabre fashion, but to realize that your stay here is only temporary. Others will inherit your property. And still others will inherit theirs. We are “strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Hebrews 11:13).

Latin has a phrase for this: Memento mori (“remember that you will die”).

In my travels, I’ve toured more than a few palaces and castles and mansions. Many are quite beautiful and/or very beautifully situated. I love the location, for example, of Neuschwanstein Castle, built by the Bavarian king Ludwig II (1845-1886) overlooking a forest and a lake from the side of a mountain in the German Alps. And I love the castle itself. But it always strikes me powerfully that the people who built these beautiful mansions, castles, and palaces enjoyed them only briefly and are long gone. King Ludwig, for example, drowned at the age of forty. (He may, in fact, even have been murdered.)

It doesn’t hurt to think about our inescapable future from time to time, because we’re going to spend a very great deal of time there, in the future. And remembering that can powerfully affect our present.

And do not forget to look forward to those joys ahead, if we do, we will become careless, dormant, and sluggish, and we will think we do not see much ahead to be anticipated, but if we keep our minds upon the prize that lays ahead—upon the vast fields of knowledge to be poured out upon the righteous, and the glories that are to be revealed, and the heavenly things in the future state, we shall be continually upon the alert; we are beings that are only to live here for a moment, as it were. Let these things sink down in our minds continually, and they will make us joyful, and careful to do unto our neighbors as we would they should do unto us. Lest we should come short of some of these things is the reason I have touched upon the future state of man the two Sabbaths past, to stir up the pure minds of the Saints that we may prepare for the things that are not far ahead, and let all the actions of our lives have a bearing in relation to the future. (Orson Pratt, 22 October 1854, Journal of Discourses, 3:105)