My wife and I had an interesting experience while watching NUMB3RS tonight (as I’ve noted before, I like mysteries, and the writers are doing a good job with that one). Just past the teaser, up came Lynn Redgrave, looking regally and serenely into the camera, declaring, “I want to die from eating too much chocolate. Or from exhaustion, dancing the tango. I want to die of laughter, on my 87th birthday. But I refuse—I refuse—to die from breast cancer. I want to die from something else.”
I’m not ordinarily much of one for commercials (that one was for Bristol Myers Squibb), but that was truly cool. Part of it, of course, was that Lynn Redgrave is a woman of great presence. More than that, however, I really liked the attitude she expressed. There was no fear of death, nor any effort to avoid the fact that she, like all of us, will at some point die; that much, she accepted as a given (which far too many people don’t). It was simply the determination not to let that beat her, not to die that way.
I realize, certainly, that there’s a danger here, that of coming to believe that we can die on our own terms; I realize that that way lies a great many dangers. And yet . . . there is still something noble and honorable in the refusal to accept defeat at the hands of a dishonorable enemy; when paired with the acceptance that death will come at some point, and the understanding that it really is beyond our control, to stand and fight and refuse to give in is admirable, as long as it isn’t taken too far.
It reminds me of Harvey Mansfield’s recent article in First Things titled “How to Understand Politics,” in which Dr. Mansfield (a professor of government at Harvard) insists on the importance of the Greek concept of thumos. He defines thumos as “the part of the soul that makes us want to insist on our own importance . . . Sometimes translated as spiritedness, it names a part of the soul that connects one’s own to the good. Thumos represents the spirited defense of one’s own characteristic of the animal body, standing for the bristling reaction of an animal in face of a threat or a possible threat. . . . Thumos, like politics, is about one’s own and the good. It is not just one or the other . . . It is about both together and in tension.” Like almost any good, we can become unbalanced in pursuing it; but we can also become unbalanced in undervaluing it. Lynn Redgrave, in that commercial, is expressing thumos; and I say, good for her—and thanks for letting us see it.