The prospect of death provides a POV that cracks open the distractions of rational, modern life.
2 recent pieces of transcendent writing captures this for me.
In a piece in the New York, Atul Gawande writes about the complexity of What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?:
Spending one’s final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or “It’s O.K.” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.”
Yesterday, Roger Ebert wrote from his own experience about the faith that sometime accompanies this twilight of life:
I worship the void. The mystery. And the ability of our human minds to perceive an unanswerable mystery. To reduce such a thing to simplistic names is an insult to it, and to our intelligence.
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