The meaning of decay

Why we learn to rethink loss

Crossing my old college campus just now. Thinking of the growing I did in some of those buildings, and also thinking how small and silly a lot of them look now. Also lamenting the disappearance of buildings I knew, that are gone. They were all important to me once. They used to be mansions, temples, palaces of significance. They used to be about me. They used to be about life itself. I mourn them. Along with this, I also reflect on the vanity and enterprise of the newer buildings I now see on campus. These too, I realise, will look small and silly one day. So will the Ozymandian cultures that built them. All this will be gone. And other alums like me will feel the pangs that I’m feeling now.

You can’t go home, as the adage says. You’ll find emptiness in the places you knew. You’ll find dry graves, or you’ll find boring museums of your earlier life. If not this, you’ll find yourself in an old nursery, so to speak, just as you remember, but no longer reassuring, no longer an orientation-point for your selfhood. It will be very nice, but far too small for the person you’ve become. You no longer live there. You will mourn.

The meaning of these places derives from the relationships we had in them, needless to say. This is something many of us, like me, have to learn gradually. Orson Spencer Hall, on my home campus here, once a citadel of mid-century optimism, is gone. It housed my dad’s mysterious and smoke-filled office, so I care that it’s gone. Professor Knapp, who taught me German literature and led me like Vergil into grownup arts and letters, was downstairs in another corridor. I campaigned for student elections in the atrium, and grew social muscles there. It is those things that I’m grieving, not the loss of Orson Spencer Hall.

How physical things code like this for the significance of the relationships in which we lived and grew is hard to see. Other people’s sentimental photos aren’t very interesting for that reason. We can’t know, in these snapshots of ordinary-looking people, what the takers of those photos see.

The point is, it’s the people we remember. And here is something interesting. A feature of personhood – ours and others’, with the connections among them all – is that personhood is eternal. This we seem to know. We recognise people as lasting, in a way that buildings are not. In our bones, we know that we and the ones we love, and love itself, are eternal. It becomes obvious against the backdrop of our physical world’s decay. Said another way, we know instinctively that compared to the physical fabric around us, we are, for lack of a better word, important. It’s personhood, not buildings, that matters.

Notice that we do not slough off our dead, or our dying, as though they were old buildings. We do the opposite. We tend them gently, we preserve everything we can of them. When they’re lost to us, we revere their memories. We hope to see them in heaven. We don’t feel like ourselves without them. Some of us would like their ghosts to visit.

We do the same with people who are not dying, but who aren’t full people – the opposite of what we should do, as it were. If we take delivery of a baby without a fully-functioning body or mind, we care for them with all our will. If a grown person has an accident, and suddenly becomes half a person, we protect them, feed them, worry for them, and defend them. We know – watch this closely – that personhood is not the same as body and mind. This is why, in some cultures, we assist people in dying. We don’t conflate their apparent selves with their true selves.

Personhood, whatever we conceive that to be, feels to us like it extends beyond any momentary reality in our physical lives.

C.S. Lewis counselled us not to confuse the comfortable inns we find as we’re taken on the journey to our eventual and anticipated home. We rehearse the truth of this counsel over and over, each time we face the loss of something that for a while represented life to us.

Decay and the end of physical things has a lesson for us, in other words. It teaches us, over a lifetime, that we are not like the things around us. This is something we hear people say from time to time, but the repeating reality of loss invites us to learn its eternal truth:

Things are temporary. All things but us. We, as we suspect, are not.