Last Saturday, I visited Da Vinci Live at Icon Siam with N and a couple of our newfound friends in Bangkok (M & G). It was a pop-up museum about Da Vinci and his works with a “live” immersive section.
It was memorable for multiple reasons:
Seeing the many wooden scale models of Da Vinci’s fevered mechanical contraptions for flying, shooting, lifting, etc., made a visceral point about his mechanical genius.
I was mindblown by the volume and breadth of his writings and illustrations (some of which were displayed). The fact that even his scribbled illustrations in his notes had such artistic quality reconfirmed the adage that the tools don’t matter much when the artist is talented.
Watching his paintings, mechanical ideations, and illustrations of the human anatomy showed Da Vinci’s unique ability to combine his left-brained analytical nature with his right-brained artistic side to create his own identity. He was the renaissance era example of stacking skills to win that Scott Admans talks about.
The ‘live’ part of the show, where you are in a large hall with multiple giant screens where paintings move to classical music, was immersive in parts. I was deeply moved occasionally thinking about humanity’s arc but felt that the actual ‘live’ part of it could have been better (we were told that the Van Gogh one was more spectacular by M&G, who’d experienced that).
There was one quote from Da Vinci that stuck with me from the afternoon, which was supposedly his last words (apocryphal on timing):
"I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have."
Here was Da Vinci, a certified genius celebrated worldwide whose work millions queue up to get a sighting, deeply regretful.
Discussion on death
The few hours we spent in the exhibition made us all sleepy, so the four of us went for coffee. Naturally, as the caffeine went in, the discussion got more lively.
Then, suddenly, we were talking about death.
Here’s one of the questions:
Is an ideal death one that comes with foreknowledge, or is it a sudden one out of the blue?
I think we can all agree that the ideal death is one without pain or suffering. There was disagreement, however, about the suddenness.
I thought no one (including me) deserved a death prelude. N argued that having closure would be helpful for those close to the person dying. I argued that people must love, respect, and give time to their loved ones when they are alive, not just in the week or month before they pass away, however poetic it may feel. On and on it went.
Then we got into the nuts and bolts. What would be our ideal way to die? Yeah, we are real fun at parties.
We all agreed that we wouldn’t want to suffer, but there was no agreement on the modality. I preferred the sudden, silent death. My ideal death would come in the middle of the night quietly after having fun the previous evening with people I love, drinking and eating.
Of course, none of us get a choice. This immediately brought us to a discussion on one of N and I’s favourite books of the recent past - Should we stay or Should we go?
Should we stay or should we go
Lionel Shriver is one of the authors I’ve grown to love in the last few years. Her political ideologies don’t match mine, but I have found resonance in her words. Her stories make me think, and her dissection of human characters, even if tinged with shades of sarcasm and misanthropy, feels very deep and genuine.
I wrote a piece on why I love her.
Here’s the premise of this book:
When her father dies, Kay Wilkinson can’t cry. Over ten years, Alzheimer’s had steadily eroded this erudite man into a paranoid lunatic. Surely one’s own father passing should never come as such a relief.
Both medical professionals, Kay and her husband Cyril fear what may lie ahead for them. Determined to die with dignity and to spare themselves and their loved ones such a humiliating and protracted decline, they agree to commit suicide together once they’ve both turned eighty.
Then three decades pass and they turn eighty.
The book paints a picture of twelve different universes (possibilities) when the couple turns 80. In some, they both chicken out and in others, one of them chickens out. Each one is hilarious, poignant, and occasionally bizarre.
But beneath all that is a meta-commentary on end-of-life worries, where life expectancies have improved and medicine keeps us alive while we potentially suffer.
Truly a worry of the modern age.
Quiet Place Day 1
I walked into Quiet Place Day 1 last week purely because I had not walked into a theatre for more than a month (some people go to temples, I go to theatres).
I wasn’t prepared for the vibe of that movie.
I was expecting your average alien invasion movie with a Quiet Place twist. What I got was an emotional reflection on humanity, life, and death wrapped in an alien invasion movie.
The Quiet Place Day 1 starts surprisingly somberly with Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) sitting in a circle in a hospice. She is lonely, dying and angry at the world. The only thing she feels an attachment to is her cat, Frodo. I was immediately drawn to the moody vibe and Lupita’s exceptional acting. Sam is convinced to go on a day trip to New York City to watch the theatre, and when she refuses, Reuben (the nurse) convinces her that he’ll get her pizza at Patsy’s.
Of course, once in the city, things unravel as meteor-like showers fall in the sky and aliens come calling. Chaos and destruction ensues and noisy Manhattan descends into a quiet post-apocalyptic hush. The movie is shot beautifully, and as you enjoy the glorious visuals, you are unexpectedly shocked by the performances.
Thrust into a world now with aliens and fighting for survival, Sam is just devasted, less because the world is ending but more because she never got her pizza. The last thing she was looking forward to - denied even in her terminal life. How do you not look at the world as if it's conspiring for your unhappiness? This resentment turns to anger and determination, and her only goal is now to get the pizza from Patsy’s, even if it all turns to rubble.
I do not want to spoil the movie but in Sam (Lupita N’yongo) and Eric (Joseph Quinn) we see two incredible performances of a woman who wants to get that pizza before her death and a man who has had a great life, now thrust into the end of the world, terrified, confused and hoping for guidance.
So yeah, I went to an alien attack movie and came out reflecting on what life is really about.
Six Feet Under
Baader Meinhoff or something deeper, who knows, but recently, N and I have started watching the HBO TV series Six Feet Under. I am an HBO fanboy, maniacally obsessed with anything they put out, but I’d never watched this two-decade-old series.
Two-decades old! I was a wee teenager getting into college then. And yet, its themes of death, religion, sexuality, purpose, feminism, and the overall big question of - the meaning of life are all, as expected of HBO, way ahead of time and still relevant.
Life is wasted on the living, says Nathaniel Sr., the father who dies in the very first episode, leaving his wife, two sons and a daughter to pick up the pieces, which include the Fisher & Sons funeral home to be now run by them. Setting a show in a funeral home provides the perfect platform for contemplating life and death.
In every episode, you are shocked, surprised, tickled or just grossed out by some random average stranger dying and then the corpse coming to the funeral home. But the series is really about the family and how they all fight their demons and discover facets of themselves. It seems that even when you’re dealing with death daily, none of them seem to treat their lives to be lived fully and regretlessly (at least in the beginning).
There are so many beautiful quotes in the first season I’ve watched.
“If there’s any justice in the universe, she’s shovelling shit in Hell.”
“Well, we’re all wounded. We carry our wounds around with is through life, and eventually they kill us. Things happen that leave a mark in space, in time. In us.”
“When someone sees you as you really are and wants to be with you, that’s powerful.”
Deathbed regrets
Shanon L. Alder had been a therapist for 25 years at a rehabilitation hospital, and she compiled a list of the top 10 most common deathbed regrets from people:
I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life other people expected of me.
I wish I took time to be with my children more when they were growing up.
I wish I had the courage to express my feelings, without the fear of being rejected or unpopular.
I wish I would have stayed in touch with friends and family.
I wish I would have forgiven someone when I had the chance.
I wish I would have told the people I loved the most how important they are to me.
I wish I would have had more confidence and tried more things, instead of being afraid of looking like a fool.
I wish I would have done more to make an impact in this world.
I wish I would have experienced more, instead of settling for a boring life filled with routine, mediocrity and apathy.
I wish I would have pursued my talents and gifts.
Does knowing the above list change how we live? Maybe. Does acting on the above list guarantee no regrets in our deathbed? Probably not.
This is not to paint a pessimistic picture, but life, as we all know it, is bruisingly final, and the paths not taken are always going to be infinite.
Back to Da Vinci
Da Vinci lived a life where he exercised his talents. Contrary to what you may think, he was appreciated even during his time and praised by tutors and Dukes. He was infinitely curious and enjoyed learning about the world.
And yet, he felt regret at the end of his life.
“What more did you need, LDV!?” you could ask.
To which he’d say (hypothetically),
“More money so I could have led a comfortable life”, or
“To live in a society where I could be more openly gay.”
Steve Jobs famously regretted the way he treated his daughter on his deathbed. He may have created a company worth trillions of dollars and be long remembered after death, but he still potentially died, feeling that he had not done something right. Had he been a better father and spent less time obsessing over Apple and doing things with his family, would he have died without regrets?
I don’t know.
Perhaps the only thing we can do is to prepare for our death constantly. We’re all dying all the time, bit by bit. In the words of Stephen King,
“The world is just a hospice with fresh air”.
Except we hardly ever think about the fact that we are all dying and act like we’re immortal. As children, we believe our parents will live forever. By the time we accept that they are not, we are already required to accept that we are not immortal either. It’s a lesson we think we know, but it shocks us every time we learn it.
To quote Da Vinci,
“Life is learning to die.”
Could be Worse,
Tyag