Enjoying the view from Limbo
Knowing all the facts in the world grants not the least bit of understanding of what is actually happening, let alone what is likely to happen, anymore than reciting the dates and numbers of history grants the least wisdom about why events transpired as they did. What is needed, rather, is an understanding of human nature, including its most common weaknesses, defensive postures,...
Late modernity, having adopted naïve materialism as its religion, has dismissed the belief in the immortality of the soul, not merely as a logical consequence of rejecting the soul itself, but rather morally, objecting to the belief in an immortal soul as a kind of cowardice, specifically a refusal to accept the “hard truth” of life’s brevity and the absolute finality of death...
The future.– Everyone will die soon, and no one knows how soon, unless he is the one facing that moment right now. You might be next, for all you know. And yet you allow your life’s worth to be reduced by coercive authority and condescending experts to the refrigerated prolongation we call security and comfort, as though it were enough, “for the time...
Every human being who was ever born on this planet has either died or is currently in the process of dying. Those currently in the process of dying will certainly complete their process successfully, if the entire history of all living species is any grounds for prediction. To approach life, then, as though the avoidance of death were the primary goal or ultimate...
In his book, O.J. Simpson says that he would have taken a bullet or stood in front of a train for Nicole. Man, I’m going to tell you, that is some bad luck, when the one guy who would have died for you…kills you.
— Norm Macdonald, “Weekend Update,” Saturday Night Live
The darkness of the concept, the patient, deliberate set-up, the bluntness of the punchline…
Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” As the human race has more than amply proved in recent times, Roosevelt’s warning was exactly correct — though not exactly in the sense that he intended.
For Roosevelt meant that men’s fear of paternalistic government and socialist legislation was the only thing preventing them from escaping economic depression…
From a student who likes to fire random “meaning of life” questions at me, I received an e-mail with this reflection: Even if I will die tomorrow, is it meaningful for me to learn something? If not, I don’t want to. My reply: To learn is to improve your soul. So your question also means, “Even if I will die tomorrow, is it...
Drug advocates who justify their pleasure-seeking or escapism with notions of a “higher consciousness” which they believe may be achieved through chemicals, seem to me much like a man who looks through a kaleidoscope and believes he has discovered the true world. If only insight and understanding were so simple. On the contrary, it would be more plausible to say that we must...
The single most universal and inescapable necessity of all human life is death. In principle, though not in subjective experience, it is known from the very beginning of life that this outcome is inevitable. This awareness, to the extent that it is achieved, colors every aspect of life, and increasingly so over the years, until its certain, though temporally unpredictable, arrival. It would...
To avoid death at all costs is the primary aim and concern of human life — so says this late modern age, which at the same time is so smugly proud of having scientifically proven that life does not exist, but is merely an epiphenomenon of accidental material interactions. To avoid death at all costs is to define oneself as subject to continuous...
Follow: