Of Being and not Being
- For children the difference between people who are alive and people who are
dead is obvious: the alive ones are around, move and speak; the dead ones are
invisible, buried or burned.
- As we grow up and experience the death of people that we know, whether family/friends/neighbors or celebrities that we admire, the border between alive and dead blurs increasingly.
- We communicate with the dead when we remember them, when we read their texts, when we listen to their music, when we watch their films, when we view their paintings, when we read their biographies.
- They are not "dead" in the way that dead people are for a child.
They persist.
- On the other hand, so many of the people who are alive today do not exist in our lives and minds. They are more "dead" for us even if they are still alive.
- Our terror of dying is partly due to the fact that we can never fully know whether we will remain "alive" in other people's memories and in the world's collective memory, human civilization.
- Maybe we should strive for anonymity and loneliness, so that we don't exist in the world. I wouldn't care to live in a world in which i don't exist, therefore i wouldn't be scared of dying.
- "To be or not to be?" Not to be.
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