CARPE MORTEM

Before he prepared to end everything, John Keating waited to see what past memories flooded his mind, if any. He'd heard from mostly questionable sources about the purported life review that happens to individuals before they lose consciousness and suspected it was a whole lot of quasi-spiritual nonsense.

Still, standing on the brink between life and death, teetering precariously on the edge of his office desk, he wavered for a brief moment, hoping he could remember something positive and significant to give a final sense of meaning to his now truly desperate state of existence.

Life in California hadn't turned out quite as he'd hoped after leaving Welton Academy under a cloud of controversy. He'd been teaching at Berkeley for nearly two decades now. Ironically (at least to John), what had been his anti-conformist position at Welton back in the late 50's had now become the mainstream in sunny Cal. He had begun to suspect that the cultural revolution he'd played some minor part in spearheading via his polemical lectures and academic magazine articles was now becoming nothing more than a hollow dream, an empty cliche, where the mantras of the counter-culture were currently being printed on T-shirts and sold at tourist shops along with miniature replicas of the Hollywood sign. "Heck, we might as well have had Mickey Mouse as our trojan horse for the revolution after all," he'd said to one of his colleagues at the university, wistfully joking.

After a string of failed relationships while teaching at Berkeley (including a tempestuous one with a colleague and a morally questionable one with a student), Keating had become increasingly depressed about his inability to hold onto anything precious to him. He was certainly a long way from the idealised dream of marriage he'd once hoped for with Anne back when they were briefly husband and wife in London. Having now surrendered that principled notion to the age of 'free' love; he considered his current embittered solitude clearly being the heavy price he was now having to pay for all those wasted and lost years justifying non-commitment as if it was a great and noble virtue.

"Free love sure doesn't come for free. It comes at a heavy, heavy cost," he'd mused a few years later to himself after the 60's 'revolution' had petered out into a 1970's hangover.

Then he suddenly remembered his quoting of Thoreau to the academy boys at Welton and the need "to live deep and suck the marrow out of life." Thinking of their bright young faces hanging off his every word in the frosty autumn mornings on the grounds of the campus, he felt hollow himself now, sensing he had betrayed both them and the quote itself. The truth was, he was barely eking out what was left of his miserable life as a single, elderly man imprisoned inside the academic institutions he had committed himself to. He now watched endless new waves of fresh, young faces sit before him each semester, reminding him of his ever dwindling mortality all the while bitterly envying them their youth.

"You're a damn fraud, Keating."

He could have ended it in that split second of anger toward himself but he held on just a little longer, waiting to see what else he could see in his cloudy, inverted crystal ball that only contained the past and no sense of any future. Besides, he thought to himself, what do I care about the future anyway if I have no desire to live?

A flash of his wife Anne's face back in those happy days back in London seemed as much a fantasy as a movie on screen. It felt like another lifetime ago now and so much had changed since that time. Whichever John Keating he was back then, he was no longer. The truth was he had shape shifted with the zeitgeist and was now suffering for not rooting himself in something more valuable, something eternal.

Something like Beethoven.

Along with his last, fondly remembered childhood favourite supper of chicken casserole, he'd played his beloved 'Emperor' one final time. It was the Van Kempen conducted recording with Wilhelm Kempf and watching the shiny black vinyl spinning round on the turntable, he thought of all the dark times he'd listened to it for consolation. For Keating, it was the truth and when he avoiding being honest with himself, he rarely went back to it for that very reason. He remembered playing it one time talking with his student Neil in his office at Welton. There was something about the fragile way the student had uttered, 'I'm trapped' back then which had haunted Keating ever since. Two words that said more than even Thoreau. The existential dilemma for everyone born on this earth, he'd reflected to himself. So succinct. So undeniable.

Keating was trapped himself now and as he prepared his final moments he thought about Neil and what must have gone through his young mind that cold December night in his parents' house, far away from his friends. It struck Keating that it took incredible courage for Neil to shoot himself like that. He could never be so violent about it. Holding the noose in his hands, he wondered if this was to be both his way of atoning for his role in Neil's death and finally showing solidarity with his deceased student.

That seemed a good enough reason to Keating and he pulled the rope slowly over his head.

And then, a final image came to his lonely mind as he remembered being held aloft by all his students after he'd combined a sports, poetry and music lesson all at once on the football field at Welton. There was something immortal and golden about that moment where they were all as one in the sheer delight of existing, the 'ode to joy' still repeating in their minds long after the wind-up gramophone he'd hauled outside had stopped playing.

They were truly seizing the day.

'O Captain, My Captain'

And with that image fixed firmly in his mind, John Keating stepped off the table and ended his own revolution, kicking violently for a few moments before a profound silence descended all about the room.