The Denial of Death

If you took a blind and dumb organism and gave it self-consciousness and a name, if you made it stand out of nature and know consciously that it was unique, then you would have narcissism.

As Aristotle somewhere put it: luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow.

which is why we still thrill to them: we like to be reminded that our central calling, our main task on this planet, is the heroic*

“mankind’s common instinct for reality… has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.”

Even a book of broad scope has to be very selective of the truths it picks out of the mountain of truth that is stifling us.

I mean that, usually, in order to turn out a piece of work the author has to exaggerate the emphasis of it, to oppose it in a forcefully competitive way to other versions of truth; and he gets carried away by his own exaggeration, as his distinctive image is built on

For centuries man lived in the belief that truth was slim and elusive and that once he found it the troubles of mankind would be over. And here we are in the closing decades of the 20th century, choking on truth.

No doubt, one of the reasons Becker has never found a mass audience is because he shames us with the knowledge of how easily we will shed blood to purchase the assurance of our own righteousness.

The man of knowledge in our time is bowed down under a burden he never imagined he would ever have: the overproduction of truth that cannot be consumed.