This time of year, Australia is especially popular among the young crowd from Europe. Fleeing from sub-arctic temperatures, many congregate on the warm, sunny beaches near Sydney. The concentration of such places gives the city a laid-back vibe, with many denizens idling their days stretched out on towels, or, for the more active, mounting a surfboard and braving the pounding waves. For the hostellers, the beach is a welcome reprieve, offering a good place to nap off the hangover from the night before.
In opposition to many of the city areas, with names like “George street” and “Prince Alfred Park”, the beaches mostly carry the names given by Aboriginals, as if to signify that these are older places, catering to the instincts which have been with us for as long as there have been men, and which are still with us today.
Best of all, the beaches are free, and so, as a traveller on a strict budget, I headed yesterday to the beach. Realizing upon arrival that I’d like something a bit more active, and it being a bit too chilly for a swim, I opted for a walk from Coogee beach to Bondi. The walk led to more reflection than I’d anticipated. I had intended simply to take in the sights, listen to the waves, and perhaps watch the birds flit about, fighting over the scraps offered by the humans.
I encountered instead, nearly instantly, a sculpture. Towering above me, its linked rings conjured a feeling of infinity. Untouching, the rings suggested that even the things that don’t directly impact us are still somehow tied up in us, if we decide to see them. And nearby, a plaque, and on the plaque a list of names.
The incident described by the plaque doesn’t merit the dignity of anything but the most basic description. A callous terrorist attack in Bali, Indonesia, claiming the lives of more than 200 people from over 20 countries. The site of the memorial, where I stood, was dubbed “The Place of Reflection”. And so I reflected.
I read the names on the plaque, and was struck by a detail: some of the names listed had nicknames scribed beside them. Names are something that we all possess, and they are the very first part of our identity. Before we realize that we are even boys or girls (much less the more detailed questioning of identity, gender, sexuality, and everything else humans undergo in our process of maturation) we know our names. Our full names, though, of course, are typically far too formal for normal use – as well as, when growing up, gaining an association with punishment. “Maxwell Andrew Millick!” my mother would roar, as if in some corner of her mind, her love for me forced her to give advance warning, to aid me in some small way, that I might have a chance to run before her wrath. I’m sure others have had a similar experience.
Some of us choose different names for ourselves, or are given names by others that are unique to our relationship. I’ve been called many things: Max, Sir, Lieutenant, Midshipman, Millick. My Dad, too, has several nicknames, having been christened Pete, Peter, Machine Gun Millick, Captain Insano, and I’m sure many others. Nicknames have one other quality separate from our surname and given name: they are sentimental. They show, in their oddity, a careful selection of our traits by those who know us best. The nature of nicknames is that, except in the most narcissistic cases, they are chosen by others: they are defined by relationship. By nature, having a nickname implies that others care about you enough to have noticed something odd going on, which they want others to know. So it is with Len “Fatso” Murray, who’s name titles a plaque further on my walk, adhered to a wide stairway with the subtitle: “These stairs widened for his and the public’s comfort.” Nicknames are a way of showing affection for each other, and so it is that the inclusion of the nicknames of those lost lives demonstrates that they were not unloved. Unlike Eleanor Rigby, people had noticed that these souls were gone.
I wondered how Stephen “Fish” Buchan had earned his title. Was he a good swimmer? A fisherman? Or had he been drunkenly dragged off his feet by a large fish, coming up out of the water for air, sputtering how it wasn’t funny (after all, it had been a $400 dollar fishing pole), as his friends laughed at him. Or consider Elizabeth “Lizzy” Kotronakis, likely assigned the name by the same parents who had assigned the formal one. Imagine years ago, little Lizzy, running around, causing havoc, until her parents were forced to exercise her quatro-syllabic alternative moniker.
The nicknames forced these people into reality for me, though I had no knowledge of their backstories (the episodes above are fictional), their appearance, history, anything. As I stared out over the sea, I thought of a passage from The Sheltering Sky, in which author Paul Bowles writes, “Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.” It also reminds me of a Buddhist practitioner I recently heard, who reminds himself upon every meeting with friends, every great joke he tells, “one less”. One less of those in life.
Taken a certain way, this is a dreadfully depressing thought. After all, aren’t Bowles and this Buddhist man advocating that we continuously remind ourselves that we’re running out; that, like my bank account, there’s nothing else being added; that, like grains of sand in an hourglass, all of the things that we love are falling through the narrow neck, never to be recovered? Not at all. The point they are making is that we must not take our lives for granted, that we must savor and cherish the moments in our lives that we value. As I walked along the beach, I considered that it might be the only time in my life, realistically, that I would be there, and the sound of waves became suddenly clearer, the smell of brine crisper, than before.
I slowed my pace, no longer in a hurry to complete my walk, wandering off the path here and there, stopping frequently. Several beaches along the way caught my attention, each offering something that I’d never seen before. One beach contained massive concrete areas to either side, giving it almost an artificial appearance, and as the waves crashed through the channel I saw some insane man floating among them, apparently at ease. He must have felt so alive. I didn’t have the courage to join him. Another had a pool with marked off swimming lanes, the water of which was continuously replaced by the waves lapping into its reservoir.
I passed one final point of note on my three-hour journey: the great Waverly cemetery. The cemetery abuts the beach, though the walk along the beach is actually unavailable at the moment, due to damage from the increasingly violent weather in the region (apt that I had been listening to a podcast on climate change just before this). The cemetery is beautiful, and contains, in a general way, the things that all cemeteries contain: dead people, obviously, and little snippets from their loved ones. One caught my attention, saying simply: “Died in a work accident. Sorely missed.”
We’re all aware, in a general way, of the fact that we don’t know when we’ll die, captured in our colloquialism involving some large transport crashing into us. But even if we aren’t “hit by a bus”, there are many ways in which we may be suddenly stripped of existence. And yet our instincts tell us, deceitfully, that there will always be time later for more. Christopher Hitchens, in a similar sentiment, writes in his memoir Hitch-22: “When I first formed the idea of writing some memoirs, I had the customary reservations about the whole conception being perhaps ‘too soon.’ Nothing dissolves this fusion of false modesty and natural reticence more swiftly than the blunt realization that the project could become, at any moment, ruled out of the question as having been undertaken too ‘late.’” Indeed, during the initial book tour for the memoir, Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, which claimed him two years later.
In addition to the experiences we cherish – the finite droplets of water that fill the Bowlesian well – there are other considerations that we should mind given our mortality, and its undefined nature. Namely, the big things in our life that we wish to do. For Hitchens, it was writing his memoir. Thankfully, he undertook the endeavor in time. So many people have told me, as I’ve been around, how much they’d love to travel. It’s made me think of a short bit from Ken Robinson’s self-help book, The Element, which I read years ago. Robinson goes out one night to a club and hears an excellent musician playing the keyboard, after which he approaches the man, saying, “I would love to be able to play like that.” The man responds, rather coldly, “no, you don’t”. Robinson, naturally taken aback, repeats himself: “yes, I would.” The man dismisses him: “If you wanted to play like me, you’d practice six hours a day, like I do. You’d do it, not talk about doing it.” These aren’t exact quotes, but the sentiment is, I believe, preserved. There’s something somewhat disingenuous about saying that you’d love to do something, and yet never get around to it. Likely, we do have things we want to do in our lives, whether it be to travel, to write a book, to play piano, any number of things. Safe in our blindness, we assure ourselves that there will be time later. Then we are blown up. A work accident claims us. Cancer strikes.
This, then, was the meaning I assigned to “The Place of Reflection”: the tragedy of death is that the future is stripped from us, that “death closes all”; If there are things that we’d prefer to do while we are alive, best to do them soon.