“All We Are is Dust in the Wind”
There was a wind blowing through the zeitgeist of the 1970s, here elegized in the classic folk-rock ballad by Kansas.
Philosophy
Flight From Death: The Quest for Immortality
This acclaimed 2003 documentary was inspired by the also-acclaimed 1973 book The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. Positing that humans’ awareness (and denial) of their own mortality has been the driving force behind civilization, Becker won the Pulitzer Prize for literature and influenced generations of social anthropologists, philosophers and psychologists.
“How a Cheerful Monk Became a Doctor of Death”
Alizah Salario’s essay explores the life and work of Dr. Kunchok Gyaltsen, the only practicing Tibetan Buddhist monk to have completed a doctorate in Public Health from an American university. Dr. Kunchok presented two sessions at the 2015 Art of Dying conference in New York City, addressing the challenges and rewards of preparing for a … Read more“How a Cheerful Monk Became a Doctor of Death”
“Have a child, plant a tree, write a book.”
I’ve recently been attempting to trace the provenance of this proverb and its many variants. So far, I’ve found it (them) attributed to the Cuban poet José Martí, to the Talmud and to “Arabia”, to Ernest Hemingway, Jonathan Swift, Jeremy Belknap, to Taoism, to Laurence Sterne and to “the religion of the Magi” (Zoroastrianism); I’m … Read more“Have a child, plant a tree, write a book.”
“Living Without an Afterlife”
As Doug Muder writes for The New Humanist: If you can become part of a collective story, a story that will continue beyond your death, and if you believe in that story and can find a role in it that gets you out of bed in the morning, then death will not undercut the meaning … Read more“Living Without an Afterlife”
“Facing Death Without Religion”
An excerpt from Christel Manning’s excellent essay for the Harvard Divinity Bulletin on how nontheists/atheists, freethinkers et al face their own mortality: We often think of science as cold and hard and value neutral. Max Weber famously wrote of how the ascendancy of science over religion in the modern world has led to “disenchantment.” Yet … Read more“Facing Death Without Religion”
The Vanitas Shrine: Remembering Death and Seizing the Day
By Tony Wolf During late January of 2020 I returned to snowy Chicago from a three-week long vacation and family reunion in sunny New Zealand. During the trip we’d celebrated my mother’s 80th birthday with a surprise party and also received the devastating news of a death in the American branch of the family. At … Read moreThe Vanitas Shrine: Remembering Death and Seizing the Day
“All that has dark sounds has duende”
Here is the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca’s mesmerizing 1933 lecture/essay The Theory and Play of the Duende, as translated by A.S. Kline. Some excerpts: Those dark sounds are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very substance … Read more“All that has dark sounds has duende”
Lessons About Death from the School of Life
A selection of videos on the subject of death from philosopher Alain de Botton’s massive School of Life project – “an organisation built to help us find calm, self-understanding, resilience and connection – especially during troubled times.”
“Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.”
In a nutshell … A seminal scene from The Dead Poets Society, in which the extraordinary Robin Williams as the extraordinary John Keating imparts the first of many lessons in unorthodoxy, recalling the finitude of life and seizing the day.