November 27, 2006
In his book The Conservative Soul, Andrew Sullivan wrote that to die is to “cease to be human among humans.” It got me thinking about mortality and how it makes life meaningful. It might be a cliché thought, but it bears repeating.
Technorati Tags: death, life, afterlife, human among humans, Andrew Sullivan
7 Responses to “Human Among Humans”
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If you believe there’s an afterlife, you’ll never know if you’re wrong. If you believe there’s no afterlife, you’ll never know if you’re right.
Death need not be final. You could have your head preserved in a vat of liquid nitrogen until the nanotechnology exists to fix the freezing damage, and suture your head onto a fresh body.
I’m not sure I’d want my head sutured to a new body, unless it was Carmen Electra’s. I think I could handle looking like Carmen Electra.
No entiendo lo que dices pero presiento que estoy de acuerdo contigo.
Por cierto, bonita voz.
Alan, muchas gracÃas. En traducción, hablaba sobre la inevitabilidad de la muerte y la belleza de la vida.
Sabia que el tema era de los mios. Yo tambien suelo hablar (mejor dicho, se me va la olla) de esto en mi pagina.
Muy bueno eso de postear videos. Yo no podria ya que me tiraria mas de los 10 minutos de rigor del youtube, jeje.
Por cierto, no pense que sabrias español. Acaso tienes sangre española? o latina?
Besos desde España.
Pienso que tengo sangre latina, pero podrÃa ser española. Solamente mis abuelos saben, y éllos son muertos.
Besos desde Kirkland, WA.
Don’t mean to drag up an old post, but this one really hit me..
“Scarcity makes things valuable, in economics and in life.”
I, like you, turn to thoughts of death, once in awhile. At one point in my life, in college, I was so hit by the meaninglessness of everything that I was essentially immobilized from doing ANYTHING for literally months. I didn’t see the point. I wouldn’t say I was suicidal, but whether the mind dies or the body dies becomes a pointless distinction at that point.
Thing is.. you justified the meaning in death by all the bad things it eliminates. That sort of argument only takes you so far.
To know that 30,000 years from now you’ll still be paying bills, and sitting at traffic lights.. personally I couldn’t stand such an idea. I would be pressed by mere necessity to find something to give that time meaning. That’s how I pulled myself out of the rut I was in that I mentioned above. I realized what gives us meaning.
It is a common idea in our culture to say that we are valuable precisely because we’re mortal, that life has meaning because we die, for the reasons you so eloquently enumerated in your video. But what I realized is this:
The universe cares not whether we live or die. The planet doesn’t, the trees don’t.. only one entity in all the universe cares whether we live or die.. we do. The meaning is ours to make, every day, and that’s not an idea dependent on whether we live or die. It places the meaning in our lives to what we choose to value - our friends, our family, our causes, our joys and our sorrows.
The world is what we make of it. Similarly, the meaning of life is what we make of it.. not the fact that we die.
In the words of Lorien from Babylon 5..
“Yes - now - everything dies. My race was born naturally immortal. But then I think the universe decided that to appreciate life.. it has to be short. To live on, as we have, is to leave behind joy, and love, and companionship, because we know it to be transitory - of the moment. We know it will turn.. to ash. Only those whose lives are brief can imagine that love is immortal. You should embrace that remarkable illusion… it may be the greatest gift your race has ever received.”
Sorry for the long posts. I’m on a roll today.