Dylan Thomas
“Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
The title of Roger Ebert’s celebrated essay “Go gentle into that good night” plays on Dylan Thomas’s profound poem. Ebert, having wrestled repeatedly with cancer, ponders his death, Thomas ponders his father’s. Both ponder death and dying. And life and living.
Piercingly, literary critic Oliver Tearle once explained how Thomas’s poem is about men using their last breaths to “contest their own annihilation.” Thomas hopes that his father (the final stanza) will allow light into his darkest final hours. Chronologically, Thomas’s “day” lies defiantly between the “night” he begins with and the “light” he ends with.
Clues to Thomas’s heroic defiance of death here, lie elsewhere, when he writes of dead, not dying men.
“Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.”
Ebert’s essay, however, sets out to be contrarian; to borrow his blasé throwaway line about life, you can't say it isn't "interesting." He feigns indifference, as if his life is as inconsequential as his death. Why fight for life, or defy death, he seems to ask. If “perfectly content” before birth, he’ll be no different after death. Unwittingly, however, he ends up saluting Thomas, whose hope — and love of life — has its own excuse to defy death.
To the Thomases of this world, life sits on an infinitely higher plane of goodness, truth, and beauty than death, because of the infinite possibilities it opens up for all three; yes, for evil, falsehood, and ugliness too. But, as Ebert did, if we see life as one big opportunity to be kind, to make ourselves and others happy, the scope for goodness expands severalfold with each new baby born.
Unlike Ebert, Thomas implies that death isn’t our natural state, life is.
The night may be “good,” as in, inevitable, but that doesn’t mean it’s desirable. Refusing to resignedly accept our annihilation is our most articulate argument for more life, not less.
To “go gentle,” is to abjectly agree that if there were a little less of life, it wouldn’t matter.
To “not go gentle,” then, is our mutinous farewell vote, cast in favor of another baby being born somewhere else, to someone else. It’s our final act of sharing, even when lulled into believing we have nothing left to share. In defying death we’re begging for someone else to have the chance we had, the chance that Ebert’s grateful for: The gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder and laughter.
To “go gentle,” is to agree that were someone else not offered that chance, it would be fine too. Well, is it?
To Thomas, it seems that we must accept death as part of life, as we do sickness and suffering. But, if we love life and living as much as we should, then we can’t “go gentle.”
Ebert doesn’t fear death; there’s “nothing on the other side” to fear.
But to borrow Shakespeare, it’s not that the Thomases of this world loved death less, but that they loved life more.
It isn’t the beggar who dreads a zero balance, it’s the billionaire. You can’t fear losing what you don’t have. The more you realize the treasure you have, the more you dread losing it. The value you place on life decides how you’ll part with it.
Only the doting mother laments the loss of her child, like a limb’s been torn from her. Only the faithful husband mourns the loss of his wife, like he’s been robbed of a vital organ. Only those who are irrevocably in love with life — and all it allows them to share — meet death grudgingly. They count their life not in milestones, but minutes. Every new moment, a second chance to forgive and be forgiven, to love and be loved.
Our embrace of death may be certain. It needn’t also be wholehearted.
Rightly, Ebert is “grateful.” He knows life is a gift. He doesn’t say who the Giver is, but his gratitude admits that there is one. He also knows that life is not a right but a responsibility, to be kind, to be happy and to spread happiness, “I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”
What if Ebert had lived longer? Might he have known newer truths?
We may live long enough to find some truths, but not long enough to find others. Does that mean these truths don’t exist? Or merely, that they’ve not been discovered yet?
Unwittingly, Ebert’s admitting that it’s not we who discover truth, but truth that — through life and death — reveals itself to us. As his colleagues admiringly acknowledged, Ebert’s discoveries transformed him, from the haughty young man he was, to his gentler, sweeter, older self.
For someone who claims to have “no truths to impart” Ebert ends up imparting a lot; his own little commandments as it were. He “refused all labels” of religion, but wears that refusal like a badge of honor, akin to a religion all its own, “All I require of a religion is that it not insist that I believe in it.”
But for someone who smarts at insistence, he’s awfully insistent himself.
To a woman he’s long known: "You'd better cry at my memorial service."
Faith is neutral, “All depends on what is believed in.”
“To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts.” By whose law? He doesn’t say.
What goes on between people who love each other isn’t accessible to experts (scientists and the like); Thomas’s “wise,” “good,” “wild,” “grave” men. Ebert’s admitting that truths hidden to some are revealed to others.
What happens after death? “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
Before his birth he was “Perfectly content.” And although he insists that “nothing” happens after death, he insists that he’ll be perfectly content then too.
Ebert bursts with contradictions, certainties, and the word “must.”
On whether he believes in God as Prime Mover or First Cause, Ebert is emphatic, “I do not.” Oddly, he delights in the “awesome” possibility that there is no Cause. What if everything “just” happened?
But why? Why awesome, as in, thrilling?
Shouldn’t it be awesome, as in, terrifying? An uncaused Cause!
After all, Ebert’s lifelong insights from gazing at a film screen testify to the fact that neither he, nor anyone else, accepted anything without a mover: The novelist moves the screenwriter, who moves the producer, who moves the director, who moves the cast and crew, who move audiences and critics, who then move wider audiences. Even his beloved L.C.Smith typewriter had a mover, a maker, well before he laid a finger on it. Of course, Ebert himself turned mover the moment he started typing. And bouncing back from cancer, he wrote of his caring wife Chaz as a mover-healer.
Then, why accept that “everything” that ever moved, “just” moved?
Turns out, Ebert did believe in God. Only, he had trouble admitting it. Perhaps, unlike others, he saw and worshiped God not in a church or synagogue, but in a darkened cinema hall, his “Empathy Machine.” He’d insisted on one more thing: movies were, above all, about empathy.
True empathy, not the easy, performative kind for photo-ops, is defiance. It defies the lazy embrace of only those we agree with. It embraces the person, flaws-and-all, to understand, not judge. The lives of good people are well-lived not because they didn’t do bad things; all too many did. Not because they won or lost, but because they fought. Their “fierce tears,” “frail deeds,” like Thomas’s, chose to bless, not curse, and embrace someone else’s.
Ebert once wrote that the movies he liked best were about “Good People”, whether they ended up happy or sad, did bad things or good things, or won or lost. That’s where Ebert comes into his own.
Thomas would’ve been proud. Ebert’s essay here is, after all, more aberration than anima.
Rudolph Lambert Fernandez is an independent writer who writes on culture and society.