The 50th Law (28 page)

Understand: to keep death out, we bathe our minds in banality and routines; we create the illusion that it is not around us in any form. This gives us a momentary peace, but we lose all sense of connection to something larger, to life itself. We are not really living until we come to terms with our mortality. Becoming aware of the Sublime around us is a way to convert our fears into something meaningful and active, to counter the repressions of our culture. The Sublime in any form tends to evoke feelings of awe and power. Through awareness of what it is, we can open our minds to the experience and actively search it out. The following are the four sensations of a sublime moment and how to conjure them.

THE SENSE OF REBIRTH

Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century, Ernest Hemingway felt completely suffocated by all the conformity and banality of life there. It made him feel dead inside. He yearned to explore the wider world, and so in 1917, at the age of eighteen, he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in Italy, at one of the war fronts. There he felt himself oddly impelled towards death and danger. In one incident he was nearly killed by exploding shrapnel, and the experience forever altered his way of thinking. “I died then…. I felt my soul or something coming right out of my body, like you’d pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner.” This feeling remained in the back of his mind for months and years to come, and it was oddly exhilarating. Surviving death in this way made him feel like he was reborn inside. Now he could write of his experiences and make his work vibrate with emotion.

This feeling, however, would fade. He would be forced into some boring journalistic job or the routines of married life. That inner deadness returned and his writing would suffer. He needed to feel that closeness to death in life again. To do so, he would have to expose himself to new dangers. This meant reporting on front-line activity in the Spanish Civil War, and later covering the bloodiest battles in France in World War II—in both cases going beyond reporting and involving himself in combat. He took up bullfighting, deep-sea fishing, and big-game hunting. He would suffer innumerable auto and airplane accidents, but that would only spur his need for more risk. Out of each experience, that sensation of being sparked back to life would return, and he could find his way to yet another novel.

This feeling of having your soul pulled out of your body like a handkerchief is the essence of a sublime sensation. For Hemingway it could be conjured only by something extreme, by a brush with death itself. We, however, can feel the sensation and its reviving benefits in smaller doses. Whenever life feels particularly dull or confining, we can force ourselves to leave familiar ground. This could mean traveling to some particularly exotic location, attempting something physically challenging (a sea voyage or scaling a mountain), or simply embarking on a new venture in which we are not certain we can succeed. In each case we are experiencing a moment of powerlessness in the face of something large and overwhelming. This feeling of control slipping out of our hands, however short and slight, is a brush with death. We may not make it; we have to raise our level of effort. In the process, our minds are exposed to new sensations. When we finish the voyage or task and come to safe ground, we feel as if we are reborn. We felt that slight pull of the handkerchief; we now have a heightened appreciation for life and a desire to live it more fully.

THE SENSE OF EVANESCENCE AND URGENCY

The first half of the fourteenth century in Japan was a time of intense turmoil—palace coups and civil wars turned the country upside down. Those of the educated classes felt particularly disturbed by this chaos. In the midst of all this revolution, a low-ranking palace poet later known as Kenkō decided to take his vows and become a Buddhist monk. But instead of retiring to a monastery, he remained in the capital, Kyoto, and quietly observed life around him as the country seemed to fall apart.

He wrote a series of short pieces that were not published in his lifetime but were later collected and printed under the name
Essays in Idleness
, the fame of this book increasing with time. Many of his observations centered on death, which was all too present in that period. But his thoughts around death went the opposite direction of brooding and morbidity. He found in them something pleasurable and even ecstatic. For instance, he pondered the evanescence of beautiful things such as cherry blossoms or youth itself. “If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.” This made him think of insects that lived for only a day or a week and yet how crowded such time could be. It is the shadow of death that makes everything poignant and meaningful to us.

Kenkō continually found new ways to measure the vastness of time, as it stretches into eternity. A man was buried one day in a cemetery in view of Kenkō’s residence in Kyoto, the grave marker surrounded by grieving members of the family. As the years went by, he wrote, they would come less and less often, their feelings of sorrow slowly fading away. Within a span of time they would all be dead, and with them the memory of the man they had buried. The grave marker would become largely covered by grass. Those who would pass by centuries later would see it as a weird mix of stone and nature. Eventually it would disappear altogether, dissolving into the earth. In the face of this undeniable reality, of this eternal expanse, how can we not feel the preciousness of the present? It is a miracle to be alive even one more day.

There are two kinds of time we can experience—the banal and the sublime variety. Banal time is extremely limited in scope. It consists of the present moment and stretches out to a few weeks ahead of us, occasionally farther. Locked in banal time, we tend to distort events—we see things as being far more important than they are, unaware that in a few weeks or a year, what stirs us all up will not matter. The sublime variety is an intimation of the reality of the utter vastness of time and the constant changes that are going on. It requires that we lift our heads out of the moment and engage in the kinds of meditations that obsessed Kenkō. We imagine the future centuries from now or what was happening in this very spot millions of years ago. We become aware that everything is in a state of flux; nothing is permanent.

Contemplating sublime time has innumerable positive effects—it makes us feel a sense of urgency to get things done now, gives us a better grasp of what really matters, and instills a heightened appreciation of the passage of time, the poignancy and beauty of all things that fade away.

THE SENSE OF AWE

We are creatures that live in language. Everything we think and feel is framed by words—which never really quite express reality. They are merely symbols. Throughout history, people have had all kinds of unique experiences in which they witness something that exceeds the capacity to express it in words, and this elicits a feeling of awe. In 1915, the great explorer Ernest Shackleton found himself and his crew marooned on an ice floe near the continent of Antarctica. For months they floated in this desolate landscape, before managing to rescue themselves later the following year. During the time on the floe, Shackleton felt as if he were visiting the planet before humans had arrived on the scene—seeing something unchanged for millions of years—and despite the threat of death this scene represented, he felt oddly exhilarated.

In the 1960s the neurologist Oliver Sacks worked on patients who had been in a coma since the 1920s, victims of the sleeping-sickness epidemic of the time. Thanks to a new drug, they were awakened from this coma and he recorded their thoughts. He realized that they viewed reality in a much different way than anyone else did, which made him wonder about our own perception of the world—perhaps we see only a part of what is happening around us because our mental powers are determined by habits and conventions. There could be a reality we are missing. During such meditations he slipped into a sense of the Sublime.

In the 1570s, a Huguenot pastor named Jean de Léry was one of the first Westerners to live among the Brazilian tribes in the Bay of Rio. He observed all kinds of rituals that frightened him in their barbarity, but then one evening he heard tribesmen singing in a way that was so strange and unearthly, he was overwhelmed with a sudden sense of awe. “I stood there transported with delight,” he later wrote. “Whenever I remember it, my heart trembles, and it seems their voices are still in my ears.”

This sense of awe can be elicited by something vast or strange—endless landscapes (the sea or the desert), monuments from the distant past (the pyramids of Egypt), the unfamiliar customs of people in a foreign land. It can also be sparked by things in everyday life—for instance, focusing on the dizzying variety of animal and plant life around us that took millions of years to evolve into its present form. (The philosopher Immanuel Kant, who wrote about the Sublime, felt it in holding a swallow in his hands and gazing into its eye, feeling a strange connection between the two of them.) It can be created by particular exercises in thinking. Imagine, for example, that you had always been blind and were suddenly granted sight. Everything you saw around you would seem strange and new—the freakish form of trees, the garishness of the color green. Or try imagining the earth in its actual smallness, a speck in vast space. The Sublime on this level is merely a way of looking at things in their actual strangeness. This frees you from the prison of language and routine, this artificial world we live in. Experiencing this awe on any scale is like a sudden blast of reality—therapeutic and inspiring.

THE SENSE OF THE OCEANIC, THE CONNECTION TO ALL LIFE

In not confronting our mortality, we tend to entertain certain illusions about death. We believe that some deaths are more important or meaningful than others—that of a celebrity or prominent politician, for instance. We feel that some deaths are more tragic, coming too early or from some accident. The truth, however, is that death makes no such discriminations. It is the ultimate equalizer. It strikes rich and poor alike. For everyone, it seems to come too early and can be experienced as tragic. Absorbing this reality should have a positive effect upon us all. We share the same fate with everyone; we all deserve the same degree of compassion. It is what ultimately links all of us together, and when we look at the people around us we should see their mortality as well.

This can be extended further and further, into the Sublime—death is what links us to all living creatures as well. One organism must die so another can live. It is an endless process that we are a part of. This is what is known as an oceanic feeling—the sensation that we are not separated from the outside world but that we are part of life in all its forms. Feeling this at moments inspires an ecstatic reaction, the very opposite of a morbid reflection on death.

Reversal of Perspective

In our normal perspective we see death as something diametrically opposed to life, a separate event that ends our days. As such, it is a thought that we must dread, avoid, and repress. But this is false, an idea that is actually born out of our fear. Life and death are inextricably intertwined, not separate; the one cannot exist without the other. From the moment we are born we carry our death within ourselves as a continual possibility. If we try to avoid or repress the thought, keep death on the outside, we are cutting ourselves off from life as well. If we are afraid of death, then we are afraid of life. We must turn this perspective around and face reality from within, finding a way to accept and embrace death as part of being alive. Only from such a position can we begin to overcome the fear of our mortality, and then all of the smaller fears that plague our lives.

WHEN I NEARLY DIED IT MADE ME THINK—THIS CAN HAPPEN AGAIN ANY SECOND. I BETTER HURRY AND DO WHAT I WANT. I STARTED TO LIVE LIKE I NEVER LIVED BEFORE. WHEN THE FEAR OF DEATH IS GONE, THEN NOTHING CAN BOTHER YOU AND NOBODY CAN STOP YOU.

—50 Cent

This book is dedicated to my NANA, a woman of strength, power, and great determination. She instilled in me knowledge. There is no knowledge that is not Power.

—50 Cent

First and foremost, my thanks go to Anna Biller for her loving support, her deft editing of
The 50th Law
, and her other innumerable contributions to the book.

The 50th Law
owes its existence to Marc Gerald, Fifty’s literary agent. He brought Fifty and me together in the first place and skillfully guided the project from start to finish. I must also thank my agent, Michael Carlisle, at InkWell Management, for his equally invaluable contributions; his assistant at Inkwell, Ethan Bassoff; and Robert Miller, publisher extraordinaire of HarperStudio, who played such an important role in shaping the concept of the book. Also at HarperStudio I would like to thank Debbie Stier, Sarah Burningham, Katie Salisbury, Kim Lewis, and Nikki Cutler; and for their work on the design of the book, Leah Carslon-Stanisic and Mary Schuck.

I would like to thank Ryan Holiday for his research assistance; Dov Charney for his support and inspiration; my good friend Lamont Jones for our many discussions on the subject; and Jeffrey Beneker, assistant professor in the incomparable Classics department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, for his scholarly advice.

On Fifty’s side, his management group, Violator, gave me tremendous support on the project. For this I must thank first and foremost Chris Lighty, CEO of Violator and the man behind the throne. Also giving generously of their time were Theo Sedlmayr, Fifty’s attorney and business manager; Laurie Dobbins, president of Violator; Barry Williams, brand manager; Anthony Butler (better known as AB); Bubba; and Hov. Special mention as well goes to Joey P (co-founder of Brand Asset Digital) and to Nikki Martin, president of G-Unit Records, for her invaluable insights on Fifty from his earliest days in the business.