I’m old, I mean old, but I keep forgetting that I’m going to die someday. Seriously. But not seriously enough to work on it. I would rather just write about that.
There’s no need to worry, say proponents of “longevity escape velocity,” or the rate at which medical advances increase life expectancy faster than time passes. Apparently, the mortality rate may still be exceeded.
memento mori It means “Remember that you must die.”
Marcus Aurelius wrote: meditationThe Stoics returned to mortality because remembering the limits of life might help us live more carefully. Death shapes life.
History is full of thinkers who have reflected on the skull. Caravaggio had something less orderly in mind in the painting above. He had first-hand knowledge of violence: brawls, arrests, escapes, death sentences, and the murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni. His biography reads more like a baroque true crime than an artist’s life.
But here he depicts St. Francis collapsing into the arms of an angel after receiving the stigmata. The saint looks hurt, exhausted, almost relieved, more upset than devastated. In Caravaggio, ecstasy comes as surrender after chaos.
His chiaroscuro technique does more than just shine a light on the darkness. Each discloses the other. His life combined beauty and brutality, privilege and shame, devotion and brutality. Although wealthy patrons appreciated his paintings, he broke the law. Moralists need to proceed with caution.
Tolstoy dies mercilessly Death of Ivan Ilyich. Ivan has been collecting the furniture for a successful life, but as he approaches death, he realizes that he may have misunderstood the meaning of his arrangements.
His house is in good order. His life is not like that.
It’s death in a grander form. The mundane version starts in the closet.
feng shuithe Chinese custom of arranging one’s surroundings for harmony recommends throwing away broken things. Swedish customs are Under installationor death cleaning, goes further and cleans up things that others will have to sort out after you die.
Unlike clutter queen Marie Kondo, who asks if an object “sparks joy,” Margareta Magnusson asks if you use it, need it, or would buy it again. In a country obsessed with decluttering while storage space remains at a premium, the issue is more moral than aesthetic. Keep your memories uncluttered.
Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker connects the depth of mortality with the mundanity of death-sweeping. Clutter, and more seriously, hoarding, can be gleaned from his Pulitzer Prize-winning book. denial of death.
Possessions are accumulated not only because they are useful or valued, but because they provide continuity to the self, knowing that they will disappear.
Mr. Becker raises the stakes beyond the crowded closet. Careers, nations, causes, ideals, and religious beliefs can become “immortal projects,” ways of attaching ourselves to something that endures beyond us.
The danger begins when we forget that they are human constructions and demand that others live or die within them.
Christopher Nolan’s odyssey They made their return trip a national spectacle. This story raises questions that go beyond the movie itself. The question is whether home and family, one of America’s most cherished ideals, can become an enduring project, a place where continuity is guaranteed and innocence appears to be preserved.
Nostalgia ruthlessly edits, smoothing and attributing pain and what was unresolved. The danger lies not in loving one’s home, but in seeking a permanence from it that neither home nor family can bear.
The fact that our ideals contain illusions does not make them false any more than self-interest makes good deeds worthless. Knowing this may help us avoid the misconception that ideals are evidence of our claims to others.
Becker’s even harsher point is that death cannot be purified by giving it a higher purpose. When ideal promise escapes mortality, devotion can harden into perfectionism and compulsion.
Religion is not exempt. Christians can talk about the death of the cross, as if Easter made Good Friday less terrifying, as if Christ did not fully die because of his resurrection.
“No cross, no crown” may refer to costly hope, but it can also turn suffering into spiritual fulfillment, suffering into proof of election. Death, rejected at the door, returns with a halo.
The cross resists that avoidance. The resurrection does not cancel death, but passes through it. “All things work together for good” means that the good lies not in the suffering itself, but in what God will bring out of it. Salvation does not justify suffering, it refuses to give up what suffering has destroyed.
What does this ask of a normal Tuesday? Refuse to demand persistence from something that cannot provide it. Clean out your closet and don’t put the burden on others to organize what you refuse to part with.
Letting go doesn’t make what we had any less meaningful. What cannot be maintained is not necessarily lost.
Also, loosen your grip on causes that outlive you, your possessions, your grievances, your self-image, and the images you impose on others.
Remembering death doesn’t deepen every choice or turn organization into wisdom. It may reveal the difference between what helps us avoid life’s limitations and what sustains us.
Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshisha advised carrying two maxims, one in each pocket: “The world was created for me” and “I am nothing but dust and ashes.” Mortality requires both truths. One is to protect from despair, the other is to protect from arrogance.
We don’t just live by illusion. We resist the full truth of life and resent the ambiguity of being human.
Embracing that ambiguity may mean being less sure of others. Criticism is still necessary, but every life contains something hidden from us, perhaps even from the person living it.
To live with that knowledge is to stop demanding that life be what it was never promised to be, and to remember, as the poet said: “No one’s lantern can be completely responsible for their vision.”
notes and reading
Ernest Becker denial of death (1973). Darwin explains the development of life through natural selection, and Nietzsche interprets human striving through the will to power. Becker places death denial in an equally pervasive place in human behavior and culture. Even a meritorious conviction, he argues, can serve our desire to continue living beyond death. Recognizing that motive doesn’t have to weaken your conviction, but it may help you feel less self-righteous and maintain your conviction.
desire to become– Maximus the Confessor offers a counter-proposal to Becker. All living things have a “natural will,” or an innate desire to “exist and live,” which can be appropriately satisfied. The desire to continue may be an illusion, but it may also express life’s basic desire for more life.
Can anything ever become nothing?—Emanuele Severino the essence of nihilism (1972, English translation, 2016). In his foundational essay “Return to Parmenides,” Severino argues that Western thought becomes nihilistic when it treats existence as something that emerges from nothing and returns to nothing. He argues that something cannot ultimately become nothing. Appearing and disappearing are not the same as entering into being and leaving being. This argument is powerful, but it comes at a cost. If everything is eternal and true, it becomes difficult to explain loss, freedom, and rebirth.
Disillusionment, the last illusion–Wallace Stevens writes of “disillusionment as the last illusion” in “An Ordinary Night in New Haven.” Recognizing our “immortality project” does not free us from the illusion, but may just give it a more sophisticated name. Illusions can be endlessly repeated. No one knows exactly where one ends and the other begins.
The gentle art of Swedish death cleaning—Margareta Magnusson (2017, English version, 2018). Practical, unsentimental, and funny, Magnuson treats tidying not as a cult of tidiness, but as a consideration for those who survive, and as a way to decide what truly belongs in life.
family problems—Patrick J. Deneen American Odyssey: Ancient stories reveal our divided souls (2026). Deneen reads Homer’s violent and complex epic through concerns familiar from his broader critique of liberalism, finding in it America’s tension between restless movement and attachment to homeland. Although his interpretation is richer than a simple opposition between mobility and rooted order, it may still push Homer’s ambiguity toward an ideal of civic restoration centered on a return to the homeland. That emphasis risks romanticizing “home” and softening the brutality and hierarchy of the world Odysseus has reclaimed. The book puts Deneen’s political ideas into a more mythical form, while leaving open questions about the regionalism and exclusion of multiple powers that shaped the American republic.
The value of something irreversible–Jorge Luis Borges writes in Immortality: “Death (or the implication of death) makes man precious and pitiful. . . . Everything has an irrevocably dangerous value.” Death may evoke the illusion of eternity, but it also lends weight to something that only happens once. Rainer Maria Rilke makes a related argument: Ninth Duino Elegy (1923): “But what has happened on this earth, even if only once, seems irreversible.”
The value of things that don’t last—John Carneys one time (2007; 86 minutes) Giving ideas to the human form. A brief encounter between two musicians becomes a relationship that audiences long for to last, but permanence is not its measure. What they created together remains meaningful even if it doesn’t become theirs. I feel like my heart will break. Its stars Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova later became a couple. Even after their romance ended, they remained friends and musical collaborators.
rabbinical saying—Mishna Sanhedrin 4:5—“For me the world was created”—follows Abraham’s confession in Genesis 18:27, “I am but dust and ashes.” Martin Buber retold, later master.
“No one’s lantern is entirely responsible for their vision.”—Arena Stefanescu“Shadow self-portrait and Turgenev” cable street,from now on.
This time it’s a fire
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Approximately 2+2=5
Source: 2 + 2 = 5 – williamgreen.substack.com
