I have more or less come to terms with the fact that I will die. That used to be a problem for me, literally keeping me up at night, but I've made peace with it. I hope it’s rather a long way off, but I accept that it is coming.
What still makes me profoundly uncomfortable is extinction. Serious contemplation of the sun burning out, the food supply drying up, or the universe snapping back in on itself like an over-stretched elastic, can and will send me into spiraling bouts of depression. I can end, and that's alright, but there must be something that continues. There must be life.
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I recently finished rereading The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross's 2007 survey of 20th Century music. It is a wonderful book, impeccably researched, and written in such a way that you can feel Ross' love and passion for the music radiate off the page. The majority of the chapters chronicle a specific musical era or group of composers. It begins with a chapter on Mahler and Strauss, and proceeds more or less chronologically. Ross has a gift for writing about music, and here he manages to illuminate the works of the century's great composers with the cultural and personal context in which they were written.
For my money, the best chapters in The Rest Is Noise are those that concern themselves with a single composer. The chapter "Apparition in the Woods," about Jean Sibelius, is far and away my favorite. Sibelius had much success in his life; he was a living National Treasure of Finland, he was well-known throughout the world, and his works continue to be performed by orchestras everywhere. Despite all this, he had the misfortune of coming to prominence during a time when a large group of composers were willfully and blindly rejecting tonality in the name of creating The New. He never received the respect of his peers, certainly not during his lifetime, and he was rarely truly happy.
One of the most famous pieces in Sibelius's canon is his fifth Symphony, a work of both profound beauty and quiet innovation. The final movement is astonishing, the orchestra struggling in the last three minutes to reach a summit that is unlike anything else in music. Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5 puts the lie to the idea that it is incredible someone so unhappy could make something so triumphant and beautiful; to the contrary, it would be impossible for anyone who has not known the dark to turn on such a powerful light.
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Currently, I am reading Dave Eggers' The Wild Things, the novelization of his cinematic adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. The protagonist, Max, is about the same age I was when I first asked my mom what death is. Last night, just before going to sleep, I read a chapter in which Max's science teacher mentions that humans will eventually be extinct, through some means or another. To Max, this is a revelation. The world makes little sense to him as it is, and this doesn't help. Eggers makes getting into Max's mind look effortless, and handles all of this with clean, simple, effective prose.
As I read, I could feel the depression creeping up. It always starts in my stomach, and spreads from there. It makes it hard to breathe, and harder still to think about anything other than the end of the world. Of course I know that one day the sun will burn out, and when it does, it will likely scald the Earth. And I know that human beings will have gone extinct well before then, likely through our own doing. But I live, day to day, without those thoughts in my head, because I wouldn't get anything done otherwise.
I finished the chapter, and reached for my headphones. I turned off the light, put on the final movement of Sibelius' fifth, and listened. In those final moments, as the orchestra attempts to build, pulled back again and again by the darkness, finally emerging triumphant, it was telling me that as long as there is beauty like this in the world, it is worth existing. You are here, it says. That's all that matters for now.