A puzzled Protestant in James Joyce’s “The Dead” tries to understand the morbid ways of monks:
He was astonished to hear that the monks never spoke, got up at two in the morning and slept in their coffins. He asked what they did it for.
“That’s the rule of the order,” said Aunt Kate firmly.
“Yes, but why?” asked Mr. Browne.
Aunt Kate repeated that it was the rule, that was all. Mr. Browne still seemed not to understand. Freddy Malins explained to him, as best he could, that the monks were trying to make up for the sins committed by all the sinners in the outside world. The explanation was not very clear for Mr. Browne grinned and said:
“I like that idea very much but wouldn’t a comfortable spring bed do them as well as a coffin?”
“The coffin,” said Mary Jane, “is to remind them of their last end.”
This phrase, their last end, returns in the final sentence of the story, as its main character suddenly feels, in a way he never has before, the reality of his own, and others’, deaths:
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
Or say he feels not so much the physical immediacy of personal dissolution as the snowflake-like delicacy, the fragile tentativeness, of any life… So that the coffin-lying monks don’t seem all that odd, acquainting themselves in this way with the quiet dark that underlies our lives.
I thought of Joyce’s story this morning as I read about a Korean professor who offers classes in therapeutic coffin-lying. She explains:
“The top cause of death for people in their 20s, 30s and 40s [in Korea] is suicide. These people are the working age group … [The seminar] can change the meaning of one’s life and give a chance to know oneself.”
Indeed Korea has a very serious suicide problem… And since it does seem to be the case among some young suicides that they do it because they don’t really believe death is death, as it were, it might make sense to get them closer to its reality… If lying in a coffin for a few moments does anything like this…
But Professor Kang Kyung-ah clearly has a greater epiphany in mind here, a moment of clarity about the meaning of life which allows you to climb out of the coffin and live joyously and authentically.
There are other versions of therapeutic, or spiritual, coffin-lying, almost all of them carrying this same assumption that descending into being dead is a way of reascending into being alive.
It’s an intriguing literalization of Heidegger’s being-towards-death idea, the idea that we can’t live authentic lives until we’ve come to authentic grips with our last end. Simon Critchley summarizes it:
[F]reedom consists in the affirmation of the necessity of one’s mortality. It is only in being-towards-death that one can become the person who one truly is. …[T]he acceptance [of] one’s mortal limitation [is] the basis for an affirmation of one’s life… It is only in relation to being-towards-death that I become passionately aware of my freedom [and am thus enabled to live an authentic life].