For Whom the Bell Tolls. Are we all Losing It?

 

Some are born to move the world—
To live their fantasies
But most of us just dream about
The things they’d like to be

(Losing it from the 1982 Signals LP) 

There are comparatively very few who these first two lines describe. Out of the billions of people throughout human history, those who both “move the world” and “live their fantasies” are a small community indeed. Not that the rest of us aren’t happy and contented with our lives or that you can’t be happy unless you move the world. But content though we may be, it doesn’t mean we haven’t dreamt of other things we would have liked to have been—a famous writer, an actor, a sports icon. Not all of us got there. 

The next set of lyrics cut to the heart of the matter: 

Sadder still to watch it die

Than never to have known it
For you—the blind who once could see—
The bell tolls for thee…

You can’t lose what you do not have. But you certainly can lose what you do have. Of course, the final line refers to the Ernest Hemingway novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (which in turn came from the writings of John Donne), and the second verse of the full song is about Hemingway. The writer who stares with glassy eyes, who once wrote with “passion and precision” loses it and can no longer find inspiration. He just stares out his kitchen door “where the sun will rise no more” (another Hemingway reference from the novel The Sun Also Rises).

The opening verse of the song tells of a dancer who perhaps because of the wear of time can no longer dance to sound of applause from an adoring audience. She is left to limp across the floor and to close her bedroom door behind her. Both the writer and the dancer fulfilled their dreams and became great. The lived their fantasies. Such things are hard enough to let go if you have to, but even worse still to have them taken from you by the march of time. 

What would you have? Would it be better to avoid the pain of loss by not doing something you love, knowing that it will inevitably decay and one day be lost? Or would you rather seek for the glory and joy to do what you love in spite of its inevitable death? Would you have joy, say for example the joy of love, knowing that there is pain that comes as part of having it? It is true that it is “sadder still to watch it die than never to have known it.” But who wants to never to have known it if you could? 

Paul Ricoeur (to whom I will likely refer to often in this blog given its hermeneutic slant) as he grew old and experienced loss himself, began a book called Living Up to Death that addressed the idea of mortality. He set it aside and never completed it. It was published in mostly fragments after his death in 2005 at the age of 92. In the preface, Olivier Abel writes that Ricoeur understood that “[m]elancholy is not something what we must avoid at all costs, for it is part of our condition, such that our reality, to be alive, must also include the absence of what no longer is but once was.” 

A theme throughout the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger is that our “being” is being-toward-death. From the moment we come into being, we grow closer to death with every passing moment. Yet Ricoeur, in his monumental work Memory, History, Forgetting, cites Hannah Arendt, joining her sentiment that despite the fact that we must die, we “are not born in order to die but in order to begin.” Begin what? Doing something! It is the moments between birth and death that we have, so we must do something with them.

 The price is sadness and a kind of death. Another gem in Living Up to Death is when Ricoeur joins Jacques Derrida in saying, “To ask me to give up what has formed me, what I have so loved, is to ask me to die.” Nonetheless, Ricoeur observes, learning how to live, finally, is to learn how to die, to accept “absolute mortality.” “What remains” he asks? To “continue living up to death.” For Ricoeur cheerfulness and mourning are bound together. 

I’m reminded by this of two other lyrics Neil Peart gave to us. From the song Secret Touch on the Vapor Trails album, Neil wrote that “there is never love without pain,” yet “love is a power that remains.” Likewise, in BU2B2 from Clockwork Angels, although all has turned to bad, the hero (a young fellow named Owen Hardy) proclaims “I still choose to live/And give, even while I grieve.” 

Although few of us move the world or go on to live our fantasies, the truth of the matter is that each of us in our own lives are the blind who once could see and for whom the bell tolls.

 As John Donne wrote, “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”