The fact that we will die, and that our death can
come at any time, pervades the entirety of our living.
There are many ways to think about and deal with death.
Among those ways, however, a good number of them are
attempts to escape its grip. In this book, Todd May
seeks to confront death in its power. He considers the
possibility that our mortal deaths are the end of us,
and asks what this might mean for our living. What
lessons can we draw from our mortality? And how might we
live as creatures who die, and who know we are going to
die?In answering these questions, May brings together
two divergent perspectives on death. The first holds
that death is not an evil, or at least that immortality
would be far worse than dying. The second holds that
death is indeed an evil, and that there is no escaping
that fact. May shows that if we are to live with death,
we need to hold these two perspectives together. Their
convergence yields both a beauty and a tragedy to our
living that are inextricably entwined.Drawing on the
thoughts of many philosophers and writers - ancient and
modern - as well as his own experience, May puts forward
a particular view of how we might think about and, more
importantly, live our lives in view of the
inescapability of our dying.In the end, he argues, it is
precisely the contingency of our lives that must be
grasped and which must be folded into the hours or years
that remain to each of us, so that we can live each
moment as though it were at once a link to an uncertain
future and yet perhaps the only link we have
left. |
|