Life begins at 40

Will Self on Viewing Death-Life As A Single Phenomenon & Dealing With Loss

aknowmadspalimpsest:

In the secular world, the dead disappear below the waves and become irrelevant in discourse. Your friend dies, your lover dies, your family member dies, and it’s kind of legitimate to talk about them for a while and to refer to them on anniversaries. But very soon it becomes a little bit de trop to mention it. They have left. All of life arranges itself to be concerned solely with the living. The dead, at best, are bit players, but mostly they are not allowed to involve themselves in the drama. And I think the interesting thing about considering death-life as a single phenomenon, is that it brings all of those people back into play. They become relevant to us again and it affects our cultural perspective as well and it seems to me that there is a sort of rather grotesque symmetry between the evanescence of our culture, its obsession with what’s new and what’s up to date and what’s happening and the zeitgeistiness and this refusal to acknowledge the personae of the dead. Without needing to consider them as being immortal in some other place or anything like that, but just the fact of their existence, that they have existed. So I think that that kind of death-life view, again, without needing to appeal to immortality or anything like that, can be very very helpful in dealing with loss, for example. 

-Will Self