Tonight's topic is death. (But I never ate the salmon mousse!!)
I used to say - and genuinely believe - that I wasn't afraid of death. I wasn't afraid of it like I'm not afraid of the mafia, neutron bombs, cannibals and dragons. Of course you're not afraid of something that can't possibly affect you personally. Most of us go through a good proportion of our (younger) lives thinking of death in the abstract. It's only as age starts to bite that it takes on any kind of reality. Some writer (who was it?) said, "in the end everyone loses everything". That is death. You can lose everything slowly, by getting very old, in which case death is a letting go of the very last thing you have, your last tenuous hooks on life, or you can lose it all in one go, by hitting a tree at speed while micro-napping or some such. So death - loss - is really creeping into us the whole time. It's not really such a savage, impermeable boundary. We live with death, with our own death, every day. How do we accommodate it? What is our relationship with it? Those are just some preliminary reflections. You will have your own...
Paul, sorry you can't make it tonight. You can sit at home with your leg up and drink wine and think about death on your own... :)
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