Nick Cave on the Fragility of Life
Against the encroachment of nothingness, we fill our lives with stuff. Against the ultimate negation, we strive for success. Against the hard information that we came from nothing and end there as well, against the resulting suspicion that we might, in fact, be nothing all the while, we struggle mightily to construct an identity, but we’re never qu
... See moreAlan Lew • This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation
don’t fear death. It’s more that I just don’t want to lose any more people, because I love them and love having them around. But, of course, we can’t make these cosmic covenants: we can’t bargain with God. It’s like asking the world to stop turning. So you learn to make peace with the idea of death as best you can.
Nick Cave • Faith, Hope and Carnage
The point is not that we should embrace pain, loss, and death. The idea of such an embrace is just another version of the religious ideal of being absolved from vulnerability. If we embraced pain we would not suffer, if we embraced loss we would not mourn, and if we embraced death we would not be anxious about our lives. Far from advocating such in
... See moreMartin Hägglund • This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
Transience also opens the way to melancholy: a rich aspect of our experience that offers up a peculiar form of beauty. Melancholy is caught up with the passing of time, nostalgia, and a knowledge that all things must end. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek cites melancholy as the starting point of philosophy: without disappointment we would hav
... See moreDerren Brown • Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine
Even in the whorl of our own personal tragedies, when the cosmos appears at its most chaotic and impartial, I have come to see the world, in its complexity, rearranging itself toward meaning.