Arthur Koestler’s Dialogue with Death is an unusual, even unique, book in that it’s the experience of a professional writer who expects at any moment to be shot. It provides unique insights into how proximity to death feels, although there are clearly doubts about how much Koestler’s experiences apply to those close to death in less dramatic circumstances.
Koestler, who had written a book describing how the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War tortured and summarily executed Republican prisoners, was captured by the Fascists when they captured Malaga. He might have been shot instantly but wasn’t. He had, however, been condemned to death by a kangaroo court, although he didn’t know it at the time. He was transferred to a prison in Seville, where every night he heard the telephone ring at 10pm precisely to announce who was to be shot that night. Over the next three hours he heard a warder with a priest with a bell moving from cell to cell giving prisoners the last rites and taking them to be shot. Hundreds were shot, and Koestler never knew when it would be his turn.
I say Koestler heard these sounds every night, but actually with a remarkable effort of will he managed to sleep through the sounds after a while. He forced himself to wake at 3am and then stay awake until 9.30pm, when he would fall into a deep sleep that would carry him through the terrible hours.
He also showed an astonishing strength of will in not drinking for eight days and not eating for even longer. He did this to produce real symptoms and so fool the prison doctor that he had a heart condition. He wanted to be transferred to the prison hospital, where he expected to have extra privileges. But the prison doctor prided himself on spotting ever more sophisticated forms of malingering, seeing it as a failure to admit anybody to the hospital, and decided that Koestler had been drinking ether. As a consequence Koestler lost rather than gained privileges.
The book is packed with wisdom (quotes on subjects other than death below and death quotes at https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2018/09/08/observations-on-death-from-arthur-koestlers-dialogue-with-death/ ), and Koestler is lyrical on how being able to read and write can make life bearable, even when in a condemned cell. But it’s his dialogue with death that makes the book, which, as Koestler observes, lacks a climax. The climax could, of course, have been his execution.
Koestler subscribes to Freud’s idea that we cannot imagine our own deaths, even when it may be moments away.
“Of course everyone knows that he must die one day. But to know is one thing, to believe another…”
He doesn’t believe that any human, including Socrates, has ever died consciously.
“I fancy there must be some mathematic relationship; one’s disbelief in death grows in proportion to its approach. I don’t believe that since the world began a human being has ever died consciously. When Socrates, sitting in the midst of his pupils, reached out for the goblet of hemlock, he must have been at least half convinced that he was merely showing off. He must have seemed to himself to be rather bogus and have secretly wondered at his disciples’ taking him so seriously. Of course he knew theoretically that the draining of the goblet would prove fatal; but he must have had a feeling that the whole thing was quite different from what his per-fervid, humourless pupils imagined it; that there was some clever dodge behind it all known only to himself.”
Koestler thinks that the mind can split, with one part knowing that death is close but another part cool and aloof as though observing a stranger.
“That dream-like feeling of having one’s consciousness split in two, so that with one half of it one observes oneself with comparative coolness and aloofness, as though observing a stranger. The consciousness sees to it that its complete annihilation is never experienced. It does not divulge the secret of its existence and its decay. No one is allowed to look into the darkness with his eyes open; he is blindfolded beforehand. This is why situations lived through are never so bad in reality as in imagination. Nature sees to it that trees do not grow beyond a certain height, not even the trees of suffering.”
Koestler attempted and contemplated suicide. The attempt showed him how powerfully we cling to life
“At this moment I was really convinced, that it was only out of laziness and apathy that I did not commit suicide. Of course I was deceiving myself again. The instinct of self-preservation, shrewd and indestructible as it is, assumes the most subtle masks. That morning it had presented itself in the toga of Socrates, who, calm and collected, reaches out for the draught of hemlock. The mask had served its purpose; it had helped the mind through a crucial moment. Now it appeared in a new garb; that of St. Simeon Stylites, who squats on his column and lets the worms devour him.”
And the contemplation allowed him a state of calmness. Others, including Sylvia Plath and William Styron, have described how contemplation of suicide can bring relief from suffering; and those who kill themselves are regularly described, often with surprise, as being calm immediately before killing themselves. These observations help me understand how the legalisation of assisted suicide suicide can bring great benefits with only a small number actually acting on the option.
“The fact that I had made a decision [to kill himself] which I regarded as final filled me with utter contentment. I became really cheerful, and the barometer rose at an astonishing rate. I was very proud of this Olympian frame of mind, and, true to the penny novelette, thought: nothing has power to move him who has done with life. It was not until much later, in Seville, when I and a fellow prisoner, also condemned to death, were discussing the various forms of fear, that I understood the secret of this magic metamorphosis: namely, that by coming to a sham decision to take my life I had simply snatched for myself twelve untroubled hours. My state of Olympian calm was not, as I thought, the result of the decision itself, but of my having set a time limit of twelve hours. Up till now I had counted hourly on hearing the oily voice calling out my name; now, by a wishful inference, I took it for granted that the twelve hours’ respite which I had given myself would be respected by the outside world. This was why I was so cheerful.”
Koestler was every day with people about to be shot, and he makes the observation, useful to all but especially to doctors and medical students, that what you say to a person close to death matters little, it’s tone and gesture that matter, human contact.
“Only much later, in Seville, did I learn the simple fact that in such cases [talking to a man who has been badly beaten up and is about to be shot] the content of what one says matters little, and the tone and gesture everything; thus, in the prison in Seville three of us managed to lull to death in this way a little Militiaman who was more afraid even than most people of execution. He knew that we were lying, and we knew that he knew it; and yet he was comforted, and swallowed our words like a drug.”
Back home in London after his experience Koestler notes that he never felt as free as when he lived close to death.
“Often when I wake at night I am homesick for my cell in the death-house in Seville and, strangely enough, I feel that I have never been so free as I was then. This is a very strange feeling indeed. We lived an unusual life on that patio; the constant nearness of death weighed down and at the same time lightened our existence. Most of us were not afraid of death, only of the act of dying; and there were times when we overcame even this fear. At such moments we were free— men without shadows, dismissed from the ranks of the mortal; it was the most complete experience of freedom that can be granted a man.”
Death, I believe, has many upsides.
Quotes
“We may lose Malaga, and we may lose Madrid and half Catalonia, but we shall still win the war.” There is a good deal of Oriental fatalism in the Spanish manner of conducting the war—on both sides; that is one reason why it seems to be at one and the same time so happy-go-lucky, cruel and rhapsodic. Other wars consist of a succession of battles; this one is a succession of tragedies.
Of course I also asked Pizarro, obsessed as I was with my idée fixe, what he proposed to do if there should be a tank attack. “Let them come,” he said. “We shall strangle them with our naked hands, those devilish machines.”
The guilty governments of the Western Democracies, which left the Spanish Republic to her fate, could neither be court-martialled nor forced to resign; they will be tried by History. But that will not make the dead arise.
I grinned back and thought how ridiculous it is that we place so much importance on the personal character of a man; how little depends on what a man is, and how much on the function which society has given him to fulfil; and how limited a field is left to him in which to develop his natural propensities….To the Anarchists the problem of the human race is as simple as cracking nuts: just smash the hard shell of social institutions and savour the delicious kernel.
What a sad sort of creature one is; so long as one’s hungry, one has no other desire but to eat and eat, but the moment one is replete the “nobler feelings” suddenly make themselves felt and spoil all one’s pleasure.
The good God has definitely put a few wheels too many in our heads.
“When you regain what people call reason, its loss seems scarcely worth bemoaning.”
One weaves illusions not only about one’s future, but also about one’s past.
If our consciousness were the aggregate of our experiences we should all be grey at twenty-five.
Storms in teacups are, for those whose horizon extends no farther than the rim of the cup, quite as real as storms at sea.
“. . . The wind goeth towards the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full. . . .” Ecclesiastes
The only time that is unforgettable is that time during which one forgets that time exists.
On words, reading, and writing
Just as the bear, hibernating, feeds on his own fat, so did I, in my head, feed from the dishes of thirty years of reading, learning and living. But my brain was drained dry and the few drops of thought that I squeezed out of it were pale, like thrice-brewed tea. It is a peculiar mechanism, the brain; it manufactures only if a market through the medium of the word or the pen is assured it beforehand. If there is no demand for its products, it goes on strike. One can fool it for a time by pretending to oneself to be the public; but it soon sees through the swindle.
I went on eating my beans deliberately, washed my bowl with special care, and put it in the window alcove to dry. Then I sat down on the bed, lit the cigarette and began to read. I read devoutly and fervently—and very slowly. I could not make out at least a quarter of the words, and, having no dictionary, I had to ponder the meaning of each sentence. But this only increased my enjoyment. I learned to read anew, with a long since forgotten concentration on every sentence, every adjective; I felt like someone who has been bed-ridden and who in learning to walk anew is acutely conscious of the play of his muscles. I fancy the Romans must have read in this fashion when books were written by hand on long parchment rolls; devoutly, sentence by sentence, only a few inches of the roll a day, so as to keep the rest for the morrow. When writers were obliged to use parchment rolls they knew how carefully people read them, and had confidence in their readers. Nowadays readers may have confidence in the writer, but writers have no confidence in the reader.
“They have forbidden me to go to and from the town and to move about freely in space; but they have left the entire universe at my disposal; its boundless, infinite space and infinite time are at my service. . . .” From De Maistre’s Voyage autour de mon Quartier, as left in priosn he refelects on his library
Don Ramón explained that the paper and pencil were not for writing letters, but for “composing,” for the Governor thought that if I were allowed to “compose” again it would “lighten my heart.” Then he added, with a wink, that since everything that I wrote might be taken away at any time to be examined, I had better write only “nice things.” I promised to write only nice things. Once more I had that exalted feeling of overwhelming, boundless joy that I had had when the barber had come, and when I had been given my first book.
My diary dates from this day onwards. Bearing in mind the fact that I was “to write only nice things” I worded it in the style of the “Uncle-Bertie-seriously-ill-inform-Auntie” telegram. If at night ten prisoners were shot, I wrote: “Woke at ten, bad dreams.” My diary of the last days of Malaga, which was confiscated on my arrest, I reconstructed from memory, as also the events of the first three weeks after my arrest.*
The Value of Death 