Precarity is today’s topic. We are, all of us, mortal – pre-programmed to strut and fret our hour upon the stage and then be heard no more, at least upon this earthly stage. We are all destined to die, but medical advances of the last 150 years have led us to trust that we will spend our last days as elderly creatures awaiting a painless slide into whatever we hold to be beyond the veil. Early death is deemed a tragedy, an unexpected and unfair curtailing of what was supposed to be a long and healthy life.
Our ancestors held no such delusions. Death was ever-present and life was expected to be rough and painful and short. Prophets, poets, and philosophers for centuries mused upon mortality as the chiefest of subjects. The best meditation on the theme came from the pen of Jeremy Taylor, a 17th-century English clergyman, in the opening paragraph of his 1651 classic The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying. Taylor conjures up a series of metaphors as he struggles to find the best image to describe just how temporary and contingent human life is. We will meet some of the perils of early-modern life that he mentions in further posts.
A Man is a Bubble (said the Greek Proverb); which Lucian represents with advantages and its proper circumstances, to this purpose; saying, All the world is a Storm, and Men rise up in their several generations like Bubbles descending, from God and the dew of Heaven, from a tear and drop of rain, from Nature and Providence: and some of these instantly sink into the deluge of their first parent, and are hidden in a sheet of Water, having had no other businesse in the world but to be born that they might be able to die: others float up and down two or three turns, and suddenly disappear, and give their place to others: and they that live longest upon the face of the waters are in perpetual motion, restless and uneasy, and being crushed with the great drop of a cloud sink into flatness and a froth; the change not being great, it being hardly possible it should be more a nothing than it was before. So is every man: He is born in vanity and sin; he comes into the world like morning Mushromes, soon thrusting up their heads into the air, and conversing with their kindred of the same production, and as soon they turn into dust and forgetfulnesse; some of them without any other interest in the affairs of the world, but that they made their parents a little glad, and very sorrowful: others ride longer in the storm; it may be until seven years of Vanity be expired, and then peradventure the Sun shines hot upon their heads and they fall into the shades below, into the cover of death and darkness of the grave to hide them. But if the bubble stands the shock of a bigger drop, and outlives the chances of a childe, of a careless Nurse, of drowning in a pail of water, of being overlaid by a sleepy servant, or such little accidents, then the young man dances like a bubble, empty and gay, and shines like a Doves neck or the image of a rainbow, which hath no substance, and whose very imagery and colours are phantastickal; and so he dances out the gayety of his youth, and is all the while in a storm, and endures, only because he is not knocked on the head by a drop of bigger rain, or crushed by the pressure of a load of indigested meat, or quenched by the disorder of an ill-placed humor: and to preserve a man alive in the midst of so many chances, and hostilities, is as great a miracle as to create him; to preserve him from rushing into nothing, and at first to draw him up from nothing were equally the issues of an Almighty power. And therefore the wise men of the world have contended who shall best fit mans condition with words signifying his vanity and short abode. Homer calls a man a leaf, the smallest, the weakest piece of a short liv’d unsteady plant. Pindar calls him the dream of a shadow: Another, the dream of the shadow of smoak. But St James spake by a more excellent Spirit, saying, Our life is but a vapour, viz., drawn from the earth by a celestial influence: made of smoak, or the lighter parts of water, tossed with every winde, moved by the motion of a superior body, without vertue in it self, lifted up on high, or left below, according as it pleases the Sun its Foster-Father. But it is lighter yet. It is but appearing; a phantastick vapor, an apparition, nothing real: it is not so much as a mist, not the matter of a shower, nor substantial enough to make a cloud; but it is like Cassiopeia’s chair, or Pelops shoulder, or the circles of Heaven: appearances, for which you cannot have a word that can signify a veryer nothing. And yet the expression is one degree more made diminutive; a vapour, and phantastickal, or a mere appearance, and this but for a little while neither; the very dream, the phantasm disappears in a small time, like the shadow that departeth, or like a tale that is told, or as a dream when one awaketh: A man is so vain, so unfixed, so perishing a creature, that he cannot long last in the scene of fancy: a man goes off and is forgotten like the dream of a distracted person. The summe of all is this: That thou art a man, then whom there is not in the world any greater instance of heights and declensions, of lights and shadows, of misery and folly, of laughter and tears, of groans and death.
