Vladimir Nabokov, a favorite of Abby’s, quoted by the always-wonderful Simen; he asks: “Do we view “the prenatal abyss” with such calm simply because it’s past, or is it more existentially troubling to have existed and then disappear than it is to have never existed in the first place? In other words, is our fear of our own nonexistence, or of death?”
I am not troubled by prenatal non-existence for the same reason that pain experienced in the past is less troubling than pain yet to be experienced: my mind moves forward, so to speak, through time. Although perhaps only entropy necessitates the progression of time in a single direction from the perspective of physics, for the conscious creature time’s unidirectionality is not abstract. Whatever happened, I -the observing and reflecting “I”- remain and persist; but when I die in the future, I will not.
One might ask: would it be frightening to die if we knew we would somehow return one hundred years later -just a century spent “blacked out”? No: it is the permanent cessation of all existing that terrifies, with its black, imperceiving, unreflecting nullity. For that reason, prenatal non-existence isn’t upsetting; it has, so to speak, a happy ending: our beginning. Actual death, we fear, will not.
