Et in Arcadia, Ego

Now in the Louvre there is a certain picture which the French call Les Bergers d’Arcadie. It is easily passed over because all it shows is a few shepherds looking at a tomb, but there is a great deal more to it which renders the picture profound and indeed chilling. The painting is not really about shepherds at all, but death, and this is much better illustrated by the words carved on the very juxtapositional tomb in the picture which happens to be the other name for the picture—Et in Arcadia, Ego.

This phrase has fascinated artists through the ages. In Blood Meridian by Cormac Macarthy, the Judge has a gun with these words carved into it. The line is the title of the first section of Brideshead Revisited, and in it Charles Ryder has a skull in his Oxford dorm room with this written on it.

The Latin means simply “And in Arcadia, I” or, perhaps, better, “Even in Arcadia, I.” The speaker is Death and Arcadia, a paradisiacal land. This is all to say that even in an idyllic life, like that which the shepherds seem to have, and more so our own, there is still death.

We live in a world that has forgotten how to die, because it has forgotten how to live. Our world is Tolkein’s Αkâllabeth, Lewis’s N.I.C.E. We try to hide from the soul-crushing blackness of death. Having sent away life after death when we sent away God, we found ourselves in the troublesome situation of riding the slow and sure train to annihilation, which happens to be nearly the most terrifying thing conceivable.

Now, dear reader, suppose you’re a clever atheist and you’ve just decided that God doesn’t exist, and now you’ve sat down to figure out what you’re going to do about the horror of annihilation, what do you do? You either distract yourself, as Pascal says, or you try to find a way to live forever.

The second option is rather out of our wheelhouse, but the first is increasingly doable. This is why college parties are far louder and wilder than what would be enjoyable. This is why there exists such a draw to the omni-distractible smartphone. This is why silence is so terrifying.

Anything to keep us from looking Death in his cold eyes. We spend more and more money to extend our lives by a smattering of months; we act like yoga and a good diet can make any real difference; we cremate our family members so that we do not have to see our own flesh and blood lying cold and hard.

The end is indeed rather nigh, and only getting nigher by the day, reader, but it is not here just yet, and that is a very encouraging thought. There is still time to live the way you want to die, and this is the whole point of Et in Arcadia, Ego.

Do not forget that no matter how comfortable your life is, you will one day have to render an account of every action to the Lord, and that this hour of reckoning could come at any time. If you aren’t happy with the state of your soul now, do something about it quickly. Gauge your decisions by what it will mean to you at the hour of your death. And then, having done these things, the hour of your death will not be the black, soul-crushing thing that it seems now, but it will be the best day of your life, because it will be the day you come home.