Everybody knows that all living things emerge, grow slow, decline, and perish.
Yet, for many humans, it’s only when well past the midpoint of the arc that its certainty becomes self-evident, like knowing that 2+2=4. This certainty, for some, can fuel despair; for others, hope for a new kind of life at the end of the arc; and for still others, an unexpected clarity. The fact of the arc is certain, but its exact beginning and end less so. The rainbow’s rings only appear bookended by violet and crimson. There is light below the red and beyond the blue, parts of the arc invisible to us, but our blindness does not change the fact that the rainbow curves up and then down. Emerging and growing may bring as much pain as declining and perishing, but not as keen an awareness of the whole, its uncertainties, its possibilities. Those on the ascending part of the arc also see possibilities, but rarely the full rainbow.
The arc of a human life might be compared to that of a tree. A man as old as I is like an aging tree, diminished by insects, fungi, woodpeckers, beavers, and branch–cracking winds, yet still alive with fluids flowing up to a crown of greenery, and down into the zone of transformation where tiny roots intermingle with fungi, bacteria, and earth —where death and life become each other. The branching of roots and crown mirror the branching of rivers and lungs. The alchemy of the living.
Because trees can outlive us by decades, it’s difficult to see the full arc of their rise and fall. Does their presence help us to recognize that human experience is partial? The bounds of our experience — the arc of our lives — disclose and delimit our world. Limitedness nonetheless has its own beauty: a chance to recognize that the drama and the treasure may not be at the end of the rainbow but within its arc. This is our home. All beyond is an ocean of uncertainty. The company of trees, for many, is unthreatening, even comforting.
Apart from trees, is there a more convincing reminder of the transient arc of human experience? It would have to be a thing whose entire lifespan is observable, a thing we outlive. Growing up near the Canadian border in the 1950s and 1960s, the most visible example of mortality to me was the American car. The path from ”brand new” to deterioration before our eyes was unmistakable. In the salted streets of the snow-belt, cars soon rusted through and failed mechanically. In a little more than five years, most of their usefulness and value were gone. Of course, this deterioration was planned. The “economy” required us to produce, and urged us to buy, the shiny new replacements, and the cycle continued, chewing its way through cities and spilling their remains into the landscape. Mortal cities. Unlike a tree’s death, often by natural means, a car’s decline was observable in a fading, rusted, dented exterior, and a stained and decaying interior. Then — as indeed now — there were decomposing vehicles scattered across the landscape, paralyzed in fields, clustered at the edges of cities, and stacked in massive metal graveyards, repeating to us our common lot. Mortal machines. We can’t give these cars a reverent death, or even the chance to return to the soil like fallen trees. Their toxic bodies remain in our world. Cars, unlike trees, are a message we have wrought ourselves. We wanted the radiant new thing; then it devastated us with its early death. We wanted the latest auto, but it soon became the late auto.
It is faintly disturbing to compare the human lifespan to that of a machine. In the early years of space travel, the metaphorical Spaceship Earth underscored the fragility of our little green bubble of air, water, and life: like a machine, it too could break down. But even if the impermanence of machines illuminates the certainty of the human arc, to liken humans or the Earth to machines is to underestimate the possibilities of both.
The arc of life and death is not simply an individual matter. We are part of the long story of life, and the longer story of the universe — an arc so far beyond our own that whether it even has a beginning or end is unknowable. Yet we are here now, and for us there is only now, and it encompasses the entire rainbow.
Patrick McGreevy lives in Greenfield.