While many of the world's thinkers are worried about the proliferation of births, it is the knelling sound of death that keeps us awake at night. The best-seller lists are crowded, in fact, with titles such as How We Die and The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. Perhaps it is because aids and cancer have implicated us all in the abruptness of extinction, or merely that publishers see a killing in the most universal experience of them all.
Empiricism falters before death.
Yet it is more certain than love and more reliable than health. And its very reliability prompts us to find ways to domesticate it. Others try to romanticize it as the great escape, the best anesthetic outside of Prozac. Death, after all, is the only reality that never lets you down. Yet that too can be an escape, a projection of our fantasies upon the dark unknown.