Friday, December 16, 2005

On death and dying

Since I'm tired of the news, I think I'll talk about something personal.

I'm quite afraid of death. Actually, no, it's not afraid. I'm quite indignant about death. It's terribly unfair really. My cat has no idea that she will die one day, and she's all the better for it. Why should we know? Why should we have been given this magnificent higher intelligence simply to carry around with us this burden? How do we carry on without going insane anyway? We have a brief instant to wander around and smell flowers and look up at the sun, and then it's done, and we're gone. And we may cease to exist.

And it's not that I think of death as the end. But, I don't know one way or the other, and that's maddening too. If it is the end, all of this is terribly pointless. But, what could possibly be next? Heaven? The wheel of reincarnation? Somehow, that seems worse.

And I wonder if other people think about it? Do my students ever think about dying? Or my idiot landlord? Are they indignant too? How much happier our lives would be if we didn't know! Or would we just become boring? Sometimes, I'll watch some moronic television program and I'll think to myself, "Shit! That was an hour!" Why the fuck do we care about such stupid things if we're stuck with mortality? And how do we ever absorb that fact?

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