Death, the ancient philosopher Epicurus wrote, is nothing at all — “seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.”
This ancient dodge of the problem of death — an attempt to skirt around the mystery of mortality altogether — has found a new and rather unimpressive proponent in Al Pacino.
In a New York Times profile, the actor opens up about his own 2020 brush with death. Pacino had contracted COVID and become febrile and dehydrated, and after paramedics arrived, he was revived after having no pulse. Asked whether the experience had “any metaphysical ripples,” he responded,
It actually did. I didn’t see the white light or anything. There’s nothing there. As Hamlet says, “To be or not to be”; “The undiscovered country from whose bourn, no traveler returns.” And he says two words: “no more.” It was no more. You’re gone. I’d never thought about it in my life. But you know actors: It sounds good to say I died once. What is it when there’s no more?
Death, Pacino concludes, looks different as you get older: “It’s just the way it is. I didn’t ask for it. Just comes, like a lot of things just come.”
3 Problems
There are three obvious problems with Pacino’s read of his experience, the first and most obvious being that he didn’t really die. Clinical death — the cessation of blood flow — is often reversible; people can potentially go five to 10 minutes as clinically dead, and be resuscitated without serious brain damage. Biological death — the breakdown of the brain and other organs from lack of oxygen — is irreversible; once you cross that threshold, you are truly dead, and there’s no going back. Pacino may have suffered a glimpse of death, but not total death.
Second, even if Pacino were right that nothing follows death, it would of course be impossible for him, or any dead person — themselves being reduced to nothing — to observe and confirm it. The ancients knew better: “out of nothing, nothing comes” — and likewise, into nothing, nothing can go. Freud famously argued that it was impossible for the self to imagine its own death; it’s more impossible still for a self to observe its own nothingness.
Third, Pacino’s lack of a “white light” or some other near-death experience — experiences that, it’s true, are widely attested to in both popular and scientific literature — says nothing against the possibility of an afterlife. Could it be that Pacino did in fact experience something, but forgot it when he was revived? Could it be that he caught a glimpse of his own annihilation — a theological conception proposed by some believers, whereby those outside of Christ are destroyed rather than damned? There are lots of possibilities that might explain his experience without ruling out an afterlife.
Does he believe it?
But even setting aside these points and, for the sake of argument, granting Pacino’s view of death, there’s a deeper problem: his Epicurean shrug at death seems half-baked. Does he believe what he says?
Elsewhere in the interview, Pacino contradicts himself: Reflecting on the Big Bang, he exclaims, “I’m not gonna die! I don’t mean literally. I mean spiritually. There’s something out there that’s bigger than us! You can’t say ‘better,’ because you don’t really know, but something’s out there going on that’s more than we understand.”
What sense are we to make of this hope for spiritual life and some “bigger” stage beyond us, if death is the end? Either there is nothing “spiritual” or “bigger,” or death’s finality perhaps isn’t so final after all.
Pacino also goes on to express a great zest for life: “We’re real!” he proclaims. “We exist! This is the greatest thing!” Asked about having a new baby at 83 and whether it might have something to do with facing his own mortality, he responds, “When I saw the little baby there and the way he was just — you look at it differently now. You look at it like, what is this? This is so amazing!”
However admirable this enthusiasm might be, it must eventually be reconciled with the brutality of our own finitude. The human experience may be wonderful, but to quote Pacino himself: “What is it when there’s no more?” The horror of a meaningless end casts a dark shadow over the whole. The more fitting Shakespearean monologue here is Macbeth’s:
Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Indeed, Pacino would do well to revisit the Hamlet monologue he quotes, which doesn’t end on “no more”; on the contrary, its drama is precisely in the very real possibility of an afterlife:
To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause . . .
Perhaps Pacino should have taken a pause.
