Should You 'Rage Against the Dying of the Light'? |
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Fighting the inevitable might be noble and life-affirming, but can also be futile and exhausting.
Thomas isn’t arguing that death can be avoided, only challenged; accepted not passively but passionately.
Raging against the dying of the light may be the will to live, but it risks ignoring the wisdoms of darkness.
Dylan Thomas’ most famous poem, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” urges us to “rage rage against the dying of the light.” As a philosophy, it’s certainly a rousing call to arms and a stomping affirmation of life over death, but it also comes with small print.
Fighting the inevitable—fighting a battle you will not win but fighting anyway—might be noble and life-affirming, but it can turn futile and exhausting in the face of an immovable object. It can set you up for a kind of emotional hernia, in which striving becomes strife, and you end up feeling like someone in a supermarket sweepstakes, racing through the aisles trying to stuff as much into your cart as you can before the timer goes off.
At its farther extremes, it can lead to the absurd and self-defeating belief that aging can be “cured” or even reversed, and death dodged with an afterlife, though it’s understandable why such beliefs would metastasize in the face of the devastating truth that—as Buddha put it—we are of the nature to grow old, to sicken, and to die.
As for the denial of death, the psyche knows better. There’s no trash icon in there, and whatever you suppress will just keep coming back, urgent and rebellious. As the artist Frida Kahlo once said, “I drank to drown my sorrows, but the damn things learned how to swim.”
Aging isn’t a malfunction, nor death a failure. They’re features, not bugs.
The Wisdoms of Darkness
Raging against the dying of the light may issue from the fierce and irrepressible will to live that’s bundled into us by evolution itself, but it also risks shutting our eyes to the wisdoms of darkness—seeds grow underground, insights bloom in the dark of meditation, the shadow knows, there’s no life without death, and a dead-end is also a turnaround.
Years ago, I interviewed people who were told by their doctors that they were dying. All of them were initially shattered by the news, but all of them were also liberated. They spoke about feeling no longer trapped by life, free to speak their minds, follow their hearts, and rearrange their priorities so they were no longer an insult to the brevity and preciousness of life. They became free from imaginary fears, tyrannical conformities and pleasantries, and petty authorities, and their passions and loves were finally released. One woman told me her cancer diagnosis was “the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Still, if you were told you had six months to live, of course you’d fight. But how much probably depends on your odds and your age, how advanced and aggressive the disease is, the available treatments, and whether they’re worse than the disease, and your personal equation of quality of life versus quantity.
Death ultimately defeats us, but the idea of death can liberate us. It may be a deep terror and mystification, but a whiff of it is also a stimulant—a source of meaning, a catalyst for your drives and passions, a corrective for the under-stimulated life, the brute existential fact that gives urgency to love and work. The transience of almost anything tends to increase your enjoyment of it.
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Not Avoiding Death, But Challenging It
Ultimately, what Dylan Thomas is arguing for isn’t that death can be avoided, only challenged. Not accepted passively, but passionately and valiantly. In keeping with his pugilistic point of view, it’s fair to say that living well is indeed the best revenge. Unless you’re snatched from life in a single moment through, say, an accident, dying will be your final mortal act, your last “good night,” but you get to choose how you approach it.
In The Rebel, philosopher Albert Camus speaks of a kind of rebellion that’s a deep metaphysical protest against whatever negates us, up to and including the central fact of life—that it ends, and we along with it. And in rebelling against it, we pick a fight.
I’ve often felt that thrill sports are one form of such rebellion, as the primary goal is to push the limit, to feel yourself vividly alive by stepping right up to the cage with the tiger in it. I once heard an ice-climber say: "I open the door, see the Grim Reaper right there, but instead of just slamming the door, I push him back a few steps."
This may also explain the adrenaline rush of fighting with a partner. Or war, which soldiers speak of as a peak experience, and lament its passing because, along with it, goes the most passionate time of their lives. They felt the most alive, right there at the edge of death—their senses on full alert, their attention and purpose tapered to an absolute clarity, their sense of camaraderie never again so emotional. No wonder they often spend the rest of their lives looking for an experience, any experience, that might help them recapture that lost intensity, which is like a forest fire, or cancer under a microscope—deadly, but beautiful.
Redefining Rage as Passion
There are, of course, gentler approaches to doing this. For starters, consider redefining rage as passion rather than anger—as in something being “all the rage.” Raging implies frantic and furious activity, a kind of emotional violence, but redefined as passion, it could look like the quietly intense presence you might bring to a creative project or life goal, an intimate conversation, even a scene of natural beauty—all of them acts of protest against apathy and detachment.
If you insist on rebelling against death or diminishment, though, at least know why you’re fighting, what you’re fighting for. Is it more time with family and friends, the hunger to finish a passion project, more focus on the joys of nature and nurture, living long enough to attend your grandson’s graduation from college?
Interestingly, there’s a twist in Thomas’ philosophy, arising from the fact that what prompted his famous poem was his father dying. So it isn’t just a general defiance of death, but a declaration of grief, a personal plea against losing a loved one. He’s not saying, “It’s OK to go.” He’s saying, “Don’t go. Don’t leave me.”
Also, his insistence that “Old age should burn and rave at close of day” stands in stark contrast to the norms of old age, if not its aspirations, which often include the desire to finally attain a state of grace and acceptance about what is and isn’t in our control.
“We all owe God a death,” Shakespeare said, so we owe it to ourselves to practice for the occasion, which you do every time you tend to the small surrenders that come your way almost daily: letting go of a bad mood, or your attachment to some outcome, making a compromise, forgiving someone’s trespass, spending time with your kids instead of working late again.
If you can’t get out of something, get into it. Raging against the dying of the light doesn’t just apply to your inevitable confrontation with mortality, but to all the life that precedes it. Why wait?
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