Jane Goodall’s Famous Last Words interview, filmed in March but not made public until after her death earlier this month at the age of 91, got most of its attention for the litany of figures the pre-eminent chimpanzee expert would, given the choice, put “on one of [Elon] Musk’s spaceships and send them all off to the planet he’s sure he’s going to discover”.
“You can imagine who I’d put on that spaceship. Along with Musk would be [US President Donald] Trump and some of Trump’s real supporters,” she said.
“And then I would put [Russian President Vladimir] Putin in there, and I would put [China’s] President Xi. I’d certainly put [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu in there and his far-right government. Put them all on that spaceship and send them off.”
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But that doesn’t appear to be the primary message she intended to leave behind.
“My biggest hope is raising this new generation of compassionate citizens, roots and shoots. But do we have time? I don’t know. It’s a really grim time,” she said at one point, and then, in an address direct to camera after the interview, she added:
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Even today, when the planet is dark, there still is hope. Don’t lose hope. If you lose hope, you become apathetic and do nothing.
And if you want to save what is still beautiful in this world — if you want to save the planet for the future generations, your grandchildren, their grandchildren — then think about the actions you take each day. Because, multiplied a million, a billion times, even small actions will make for great change.
Goodall thus becomes one of the figures both lucky and unlucky enough to know how soon the end was, and to leave behind a message. The one-time RAF pilot turned speaker and activist Harry Leslie Smith used the last years of his life — he didn’t become prominent until he was Goodall’s age — to defend the UK’s social welfare state and National Health Service, which had transformed what was possible in his own life, from attacks at the hands of the Conservative government. AA Gill also used his final piece — following his announcement of “an embarrassment of cancer, a full English” three weeks earlier — to the same end: “The NHS is the best of us”.
David Bowie’s final album Black Star, created while he was secretly dying of liver cancer, wove, in its title alone, references to an obscure Elvis Presley death song, HP Lovecraftian horror, and the dimming of Bowie’s own iconography. Or so we’re left to speculate — he gave no interviews before the album’s release, and within two days of its release in January 2016, he was dead.
Our very own Mungo MacCallum knocked off his five decades of writing about Australian politics with typical wit and irritation, apologising for his decision to “cut and run”. “It has sometimes been a hairy career,” he wrote, “but I hope a productive one and always fun. My gratitude for all your participation. So a seasonal Hallmark message:
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Christmas is coming and Australia is flat
Kindly tell us ScoMo where the bloody hell we’re at.
And when we’re certain that you know that you don’t haven’t got a clue
Then join in our Yuletide chorus as we sing: FUCK YOU!
Thank you and good night.
Joan Didion still had nearly a decade to go when she set down, in Blue Nights, her firsthand report from the land of grief, and by extension her own mortality: “I found my mind turning increasingly to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness.”
A lot of coverage is understandably dedicated to what it is to be young at this time, to look out into a future of seemingly unstoppable environmental breakdown, greater and greater inequality, and ever-narrowing possibilities. But there has been less material about what it is to approach one’s end in that same world.
The Conversationalist in 2022 ran a long survey of various people between their late 60s to their mid-80s about how they currently viewed the world. An 84-year-old holocaust survivor concluded his clear-eyed answer thusly:
I now have, at the age of 84, a four-month-old grandson. He’s beautiful. He’s gorgeous. One-fourth of him is made of me. As long as there are people there is hope. It’s not good to get cynical or bitter. It doesn’t help anyone, whatsoever, ever. That’s a statement from a very old man who was delighted to have his first grandchild come into the world.
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Alongside the pessismism and anxiety, many report taking some comfort, or at least being held back from panic, by the sense that these are not uniquely awful times — many cite the late 60s, with its flood of assassinations, cultural figures dying young and the dragging horrors of the war in Indochina, just as Goodall cites the World War II and the fight against fascism as the example for our times:
“That doesn’t mean you don’t have moments of depression, but then you come out of it and say, ‘OK, I’m not going to let them win,’” she said.
“I’d like to believe that liberty and justice and equity are going to prevail, but I don’t believe that’s automatic. I think we have to make that happen by our choices and by our actions [and] by living responsibly,” notes a 68-year-old from St Louis.
Which sounds a great deal like the statement attributed to George Orwell, put out by his publisher while he was in hospital, fading fast. It regarded the criticism 1984 had received for its apparent attack on the left. The statement made clear it was no particular government he was targeting, but the threat of totalitarianism in general: “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.”