David Horowitz - Mortality and Faith: Reflections on a Journey through Time

Copyright 2019 by David Horowitz

The End of Time Copyright 2005 by David Horowitz A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in This Life and the Next

Copyright 2011 by David Horowitz

Youre Going to be Dead One Day: A Love Story Copyright 2015 by David Horowitz

The End of Time was originally published by Encounter Books.

A Point in Time and Youre Going to Be Dead One Day were originally published by Regnery Publishing.

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The meaning of life is that it stops.

K AFKA

M ortality and Faith is the second half of an autobiography whose first installment, Radical Son, was published more than twenty years ago. It completes the account of my life from where the first book left off to my seventy-eighth year. In contrast to Radical Son whose focus was my political odyssey, Mortality and Faith was conceived as a meditation on age, and on our common progress towards an end which is both final and opaque. These primal facts affect all we see and do, and force us to answer the questions as to why we are here and where we are going with conjectures that can only be taken on faith. Consequently, an equally important theme of this work is its exploration of the beliefs we embrace to answer these questions, and how the answers impact our lives.

The first three parts of this text were previously published in separate volumes, without drawing attention to their autobiographical nature. The final part, Staying Alive, is new. I have put the four parts together as a continuous text to make their autobiographical nature clear, and to underscore themes that contain the principal lessons I have learned in the course of my journey.

Another of my books, A Cracking of the Heart, also contains autobiographical reflections and addresses questions of mortality and faith. I did not include it in this volume because it is an elegy for my daughter Sarah and is a portrait of her life, not mine. Nonetheless, it shares with this volume a sensibility and inquiry that make it appropriate to mention.

In preparing this edition, I have changed a word or phrase here or there to improve the original texts.

(19932005)

It is better to go to the house of mourning

than the house of feasting, for that is the end

of all; and the living will lay it to his heart.

ECCLESIASTES

W hen he was alive and I was still young, my father told me his version of the Fall. We begin to die the day we are born, he said. What I think my father meant by this was that the cells, which are the invisible elements of our being, are constantly churning in natures cycle. Silently, without our being aware of their agony, they are inexorably aging and taking us with them. Year by year, the skin parches, the sinews slacken, and the bones go brittle, until one day the process stops, and we are gone.

At least that is what I think my father said because that is all that I can remember. And what I can remember is all that is left of the time we spent together long ago, a fading image now like the rest. I can still see the sunlight on the green hedge where we paused on the sidewalk. I can see the mottled sycamores shading the street, and the way my father turned until the tan dome of his forehead caught the glint of the light when he shared his thought.

On this day we were taking our Saturday walk through Sunnyside Gardens, the neighborhood where I grew up. In the yards the spring warmth had pushed the yellow daffodils and purple crocuses through the black earth, creating warm little splashes of color. I remember the feeling of pleasure I had, and always did, being alone with him. Or maybe it is the lingering memory that is the pleasure. Or both. I can no longer tell.

When he didnt go to work, my father took walks every day of his life that I can recall. It was only years afterward that it occurred to me that for him the aim of these walks was not to go somewhere, but to get away. A though the life he had been given was less than the one he wanted, or more than one he could bear.

As my father imparted his reflection, the timbre in his voice gave off no hint of gloom but was detached and clinical as though he was making a scientific observation devoid of human reference. Even now, I cannot guess what his intentions were, or why he decided to share this dark insight with me when I was so innocent of life myself. But he did; and the words have stuck ever since and into the present when age is already on me and has sunk its teeth into my marrow, and feelings of mortality have made themselves as familiar as hello and goodbye.

It is more than half a century since my father and I took our walk. From that time until his death nearly forty years later in the same redbrick row house on the same tree-lined street, we never discussed the subject again. Though I never forgot what he said, I never bothered in all that time to inquire of anyone who might actually know whether it was based on a biological truth, or not. Nor did it ever occur to me that his words might not actually have referred to the objective world, but to his feelings about himself.

My father was a small, well-intentioned man of melancholy humors and roiling regrets. Bleak thoughts enveloped him in a cloud so dense he was rarely able to see the sun behind it. One effect of this rough-weather approach was to make it difficult for him to find pleasure in the opportunities life offered. When good fortune came knocking at his door, he received it more often than not as he would a visitor to the wrong address.

All our days together I wrestled with my fathers discontent and tried as best I could to overcome it. But eventually I understood that the well from which he drew his unhappiness was bottomless, and no one could stem its flow. As a result, the lesson he left me was not contained in the earnest lectures he gave, but in the instruction of a life that clung to its defeats like an infant to its mothers breast.

Unlike my father, I do not feel that life is a downhill run. Nor do I think of it as an arc that rises steadily until it reaches its apogee, tapers, and arches back to earth. The fate we choose is inscribed in multiple flights. Some follow the gravity of rise and fall, while othersthose of the spirit, for examplemay never head downward but climb steadily to the end, where they just drop cliff-like into the dark.

Consequently, there is no right time for last words, no point of demarcation for our adieux; no designated moment to set down the summary thoughts of a mind still counting. Whether you begin to die at the beginningas my father believedor whether you burn brightly to the end, you cant wait forever to pass to others what you have learned. When the time approaches you could already have a foot in oblivion, or be crippled by a stroke, or so blasted with pain as to lose the ability to reflect at all. In this life, you can be hauled off without warning. You can step onto the wrong plane, or off the wrong curb, or into the wrong conversation, and be gone. A microorganism can stumble into a passage to your heart and douse the lights before you even learn its name. Or the cells of your beingthose busy dying since you were borncan go berserk and betray you in a cancer that chokes your last thought.