View from the Precipice
August 2025
Every month Professor Sympos offers another view from the clifftop of septuagenarian and Anthropocene existence. He is not long for this life, and neither, apparently, is anyone who might survive him, whatever their age.
Before he died, Moses had his "Pisgah moment," beholding, from the mountain-top of that name, the Promised Land--a land he would never enter. What Professor Sympos beholds isn't the land he was promised, but he's not too worried: from what he can see of it, he's not sure he'll be missing much.
​
With nowhere to go but over the edge, Professor Sympos finds much to distract him here: a hawk soaring by, the bluettes at his feet. A gnarled pine hanging on. Scat. He'll let you know.
He can also, from the escarpment he's arrived at, look back at the dark valleys from which he and his antecedents emerged. Hindsight is not wisdom, but he cannot help feeling, comparatively speaking, enlightened.
The Leap
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving, but drowning.
--Stevie Smith
Death has been much on my mind lately.
Or rather, the End of Life.
They’re not quite the same thing.
Death has a personality, is easy to allegorize: Grim Reaper, Apocalyptic Horseman. That skull with wings you find on colonial gravestones. Hitman of the Universe. (Or its God.)
Not so the End of Life. It’s just an enormous blank, waiting to be filled in.
And which End of Life are we talking about, anyway?
If we’re talking about the End of Life as its Ending, its last span of years, will it be like the Ending of a book or a movie, where you’ll sit by the fire or rock on the porch and review the plot line? Or, to paraphrase Percy Shelley, when you’ll seriously put your mind to the task of “imagining what you know,” and have known from the moment you saw that flattened chipmunk in the street at the age of four: that your life has an Ending too?
Perhaps you’ll end it yourself, with a little help from your friends. Assisted suicide has become an acceptable topic of conversation among those of us wondering what to do if a spouse predeceases us, or if the mental or physical pain of dying—or should I say, “of living”?—becomes unbearable and unrelievable.
Maybe we’re talking about the End of Life As We Know It (or knew it), and asking where it went, or if it will ever come back. Questions some of us will not live to hear answered.
How about the End of Life on this planet? Extinction.
But we’ll get to that.
I’m thinking about the End of Life these days partly because my wife and I have begun evaluating retirement communities. Partly it’s because we’re reviewing finances and wills. Also, our friends are dying left and right.
Whatever the reason, for about three minutes on the Fourth of July the End of Life was all I could think about.
Those were the three minutes I watched my seven-year-old grandson make up his mind to jump from the seawall at Lane’s Cove.
Lane’s Cove is a small indentation in the west side of Cape Ann, a granite peninsula jutting up into Ipswich Bay from Boston’s north shore. The Cove takes the place of a town common for the village of Lanesville, an isolated community within the larger municipality of Gloucester, most of whose residents are huddled along the opposite side of the Cape facing south and east.
My wife and I spend our summers in Lanesville, where we’re often joined by our children and grandchildren.
For the two centuries of its existence the village has preserved its unique sense of identity. It’s one of the few places on the eastern seaboard where you can view sunsets over the Atlantic Ocean. It also has its own traditions. One of these is jumping from the seawall at the entrance to Lane’s Cove.
Every summer, the warm weather draws Monarch butterflies back to Cape Ann and teenagers to the seawall. There they leap the twenty feet or more (depending on the tide) down to the black waters in the entrance gap, which is dredged to allow boat traffic in and out. We can see them from our front porch on hot summer afternoons, as one by one they disappear over the edge.
This Fourth of July we were joined by my older son, his wife, and their seven-year-old boy, Emmet. Emmet had seen his father jump from the seawall on a previous visit and now wanted to try it himself. His mother reluctantly gave her assent and went along to photograph the feat for posterity. His grandmother declined the invitation. She couldn’t bear the idea of witnessing the senseless death of her only grandson. Grampa agreed to come along to help record the event. Also, he was curious.
As my daughter-in-law and I watched from below, my son accompanied Emmet to the leaping-off spot. Then he explained how it was done. The most important thing was to jump far enough out to clear the narrow ledge below. The second most important thing was to enter the water feet first, body straight, arms in, to avoid hurting yourself. He then jumped to demonstrate and waited, treading water, for Emmet to follow.
And waited.
And waited.
The water temperature in Lane’s Cove in early July is in the low 60s.
While my son flirted with hypothermia and Emmet made up his mind, my daughter-in-law, camera poised, turned her head to me and said, “I can’t stand this.”
Above us, Emmet slowly approached the gap, curled his toes over the edge as instructed, and jumped.
A hundred thoughts rushed into my head as Emmet’s body left the surface of the planet. Most of them had to do with death by drowning and of those a significant number involved death from leaping into the water—not just by drowning but by hitting the surface too fast or the wrong way and breaking bones or rupturing vital organs. Twenty feet wasn’t high enough to cause that kind of damage. But Cape Ann is pock-marked by abandoned, water filled quarries that attract swimmers and jumpers. Just last year a teenager had died jumping into Vernon quarry, a half mile away.
An instant later, Emmet cleared the ledge.
“He’s going to make it,” I realized.
A moment after that, Emmet assumed the upright position, as his father had shown him.
And then he went under, holding his breath,
and I resumed breathing.
It wasn’t until my grandson came up for air and climbed onto his father’s sturdy back that other thoughts began surfacing in my mind, thoughts of what this leap would mean to Emmet in years to come and what it already meant to me as a harbinger of those years, when I would no longer have even a narrow ledge to stand on and witness them.
I was thinking, not of Emmet’s End of Life, but mine.
Why do we envy our survivors? We should be thanking them. Without them, the meanings of our lives would die with us. I’m not talking just about children and grandchildren and a line of “begats,” or the sunny memories of Grammy and Grampa that we think our descendants will cherish but that will, in fact, be lost by the third generation. I’m talking about all the beneficiaries of our little acts of largesse, in or out of the line of succession: students, interns, mentees; neighbors and friends; the unhoused and hungry and harried; the isolated and imprisoned, anyone we’ve taken the time to advise or console, help or comfort.
It’s not so they’ll remember us that we do good to others. So few of them will, and practically none beyond a decade or two after we die. We help and comfort to make a positive difference in the world. That difference, big or small, and the unpredictable differences it will make for succeeding generations, is all that will, in any meaningful sense, survive us.
I emphasize the word, “meaningful.” The existentialists got it half right. Yes, I am the only meaning of my life for as long as I’m alive. But the only meaning that will survive my death is what my life meant to others, not as a fading memory, but as an event that has consequences— ripples, if you will, extending in every direction.
I say this knowing that any difference I make by having lived will, inevitably, lose itself in the noise of events over which I have no control. Still, attenuated as it may become, I feel certain the unpredictable impact of my life on humanity will outlast humanity’s awareness of my having lived at all.
So I have to make sure my impact is positive. That’s no guarantee of a positive outcome, or outcomes, according to The Law of Unintended Consequences. But it does improve the odds, as long as humanity outlasts me.
Which brings us, as promised, to the topic of Extinction.
I don’t know about you, but for me, the saddest thing about the thought of death, aside from the death of someone I know and love, is the idea of the death of humanity itself. Many would welcome such an eventuality in view of the mess we’ve made of things, but I find no reason to rejoice. For how can a human life leave its mark, however faint, on future generations if there are none to receive it?
In “Not Waving but Drowning,” Stevie Smith summarized, in twelve lines, the waste of a life whose meaning cannot be preserved because it was never meaningful to begin with.
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
Smith understood the tragedy of a life not understood, a life whose meaning cannot be passed on to others because the person living it was “too far out” from the shore of the human community to make that meaning legible beyond the most cursory exchange of greetings. Her poem can be summarized in six monosyllables: “I was here, now I’m not.” But its sense is more profound: “The meaning of my life did not survive me because it made no difference.”
Emmet’s leap of faith made my faith leap. It left me feeling heartened for the survival of the meaning of human existence. The moment he came to the surface, I became less anxious about the End of Life.
Others will jump in.