Never met Ebert, who died today at the age of 69 after a recurrence of cancer (just one day after announcing he was cutting back his daily work but still working). Interviewed him once on the phone, I know not for what. I was among the many who never cared much one way or another about his film reviews but loved his late-in-life essays and blog posts and tweets about all sorts of other subjects, including politics ("Our gun laws are insane") and his travels, and film (beyond his reviewing).
Here's how he wrote about what he hoped happened after his death, since he did not necessarily beleive in God or that kind of afterlife. It was titled, "I Do Not Fear Death."
Many readers have informed me that it is a tragic and dreary business
to go into death without faith. I don’t feel that way. “Faith” is
neutral. All depends on what is believed in. I have no desire to live
forever. The concept frightens me. I am 69, have had cancer, will die
sooner than most of those reading this. That is in the nature of things.
In my plans for life after death, I say, again with Whitman:
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
And with Will, the brother in Saul Bellow’s “Herzog,” I say, “Look for me in the weather reports.”
Raised
as a Roman Catholic, I internalized the social values of that faith and
still hold most of them, even though its theology no longer persuades
me. I have no quarrel with what anyone else subscribes to; everyone
deals with these things in his own way, and I have no truths to impart.
All I require of a religion is that it be tolerant of those who do not
agree with it. I know a priest whose eyes twinkle when he says, “You go
about God’s work in your way, and I’ll go about it in His.”
What I
expect to happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to
function and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I
have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’ theory of
memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions,
songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés
that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a
lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting and telling too many jokes, I
will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually
die, but so it goes.
He then closed by quoting one of my favorite passages from the writings of Van Gogh.
Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?
Just
as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a
star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can
take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that
cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion.
Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means.
To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot.
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