The art of dying

New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl has written an affecting rumination on life, in the shadow of his terminal cancer diagnosis. ("The Art of Dying," Dec. 23 issue).

It includes an insight into his own charitable approach to "uncongenial" art works that might be usefully applied to his personal religiosity as well.

I retain, but suspend, my personal taste to deal with the panoply of the art I see. I have a trick for doing justice to an uncongenial work: “What would I like about this if I liked it?” I may come around; I may not. Failing that, I wonder, What must the people who like this be like? Anthropology.

A few short paragraphs later,

“I believe in God” is a false statement for me because it is voiced by my ego, which is compulsively skeptical. But the rest of me tends otherwise. Staying on an “as if” basis with “God,” for short, hugely improves my life. I regret my lack of the church and its gift of community. My ego is too fat to squeeze through the door.

Disbelieving is toilsome. It can be a pleasure for adolescent brains with energy to spare, but hanging on to it later saps and rigidifies. After a Lutheran upbringing, I became an atheist at the onset of puberty. That wore off gradually and then, with sobriety, speedily.

I don't like this. But, out of respect for the dying and for the vaunted varieties of religious and scientific experience, I suppress my initial uncharitable impulse  and ask: What would I like about this if I liked it? And, What must the people who like this be like?

People who find disbelief "toilsome" and "adolescent" have obviously had a different experience than I. But I'm prepared to respect it, and them, if only they can evince just a little more respect for people like me.

Let's all stop talking about outgrowing either religion or irreligion, respectively, and admit that it takes all kinds. Neither attitude necessarily implicates the (dis)believer as an excessive egoist or rigid dogmatist.

In his penultimate paragraph Schjeldahl says

God creeps in. Human minds are the universe’s only instruments for reflecting on itself. The fact of our existence suggests a cosmic approval of it. (Do we behave badly? We are gifted with the capacity to think so.) We may be accidents of matter and energy, but we can’t help circling back to the sense of a meaning that is unaccountable by the application of what we know. If God is a human invention, good for us! We had to come up with something.

One of the themes of our Atheism & Philosophy course this coming semester will be the search for meaning, and the thesis that we didn't have to come up with God to come up with it.

The final paragraph I can wholeheartedly endorse:

Take death for a walk in your minds, folks. Either you’ll be glad you did or, keeling over suddenly, you won’t be out anything.