Of Practice

It is reason that instructs us, but practice that makes us capable. The difference between a man who has merely read about danger and a man who has been in it is the difference between a map and a country. I would not trust my own courage, which I have never sufficiently put to the proof, but I will say that the experience of something like death has taught me more about living than all the philosophy I have read, which is not a small quantity.

Some years ago, riding near my estate, I was thrown from my horse — thrown hard, against the ground, in a collision I did not see coming. My people told me afterward that I lay for a great while without motion or feeling. When I began to return to myself, it was not as a man waking from sleep. There was no sharp edge to the moment, no clarity of arrival. I was simply, gradually, less absent. I vomited. I spoke incoherently. I did not know I had spoken. All of this happened without my participation — my body conducted its business of returning to life while I was elsewhere, or nowhere.

What I learned from this is that we know nothing of dying from our imagination of it. Nature carries us through on her own account.

What struck me most, on reflection, was the sweetness of that halfway state — the condition of being neither dead nor properly alive, in which there was no fear, no pain, no sense of loss. The terror of death, which I had long contemplated with philosophical seriousness, was entirely absent from the experience of what might have been dying. This was not courage on my part. I had no part in it. The body simply does not consult the mind on these matters. It manages its departures as it manages its functions — without asking permission, and generally with more competence than we expect.

I set this down not as doctrine but as report. I can only testify to what happened in this particular body on this particular afternoon. But I am inclined to believe that nature, who has arranged birth and sleep without our assistance, has also arranged death, and does it no less gently than she does the rest.