Author Topic: Looking Death In The Face  (Read 1154 times)

Keith Maitland

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Looking Death In The Face
« on: December 26, 2016, 08:36:39 PM »
All of this will be over soon, faster than you think. Fame has a shadow — inevitable decline. The year 2016 has delivered a string of deaths that serve as bracing reminders of this inevitability. Of course, it has also been a year that has ushered in a new empire and, simultaneously, the specter of apocalypse. The year’s end is a time to take account of kingdoms built, but also the sheer rapidity of their destruction. It is a chance to come to terms with the existential fragility that is overlooked in most of our waking hours and that must be faced even by the greatest among us.

Read here

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/26/opinion/looking-death-in-the-face.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region

floo

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Re: Looking Death In The Face
« Reply #1 on: December 27, 2016, 10:33:12 AM »
KM it is very sad your threads are always full of doom and gloom!  :o There is a lot of joy and happiness in this world too.

Walter

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Re: Looking Death In The Face
« Reply #2 on: December 27, 2016, 10:52:54 AM »
KM it is very sad your threads are always full of doom and gloom!  :o There is a lot of joy and happiness in this world too.

well said Floo.

Humph Warden Bennett

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Re: Looking Death In The Face
« Reply #3 on: December 27, 2016, 11:42:00 AM »
TBH I can think of better uses of my conscious time than worrying about death.

If I thought that the world really was coming to an end then I would not pay my utility bills.

Humph Warden Bennett

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Re: Looking Death In The Face
« Reply #4 on: December 27, 2016, 11:48:02 AM »
KM it is very sad your threads are always full of doom and gloom!  :o There is a lot of joy and happiness in this world too.

I always get the impression that if you advise Keith to go out and smell the roses he will moan that in six weeks time they will have no scent left.

Bramble

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Re: Looking Death In The Face
« Reply #5 on: December 27, 2016, 01:17:32 PM »
Keith, your posts suggest an aversion to life and death in almost equal measure, which strikes me as odd. As you seem to find life so disagreeable don't you in some way, at least, rejoice in the prospect of it coming to an end? Unfashionable as it might to think this way I've long regarded death as life's greatest consolation because I can't easily imagine anything worse than having to go on and on and on for ever. The process of dying might be awful but what could one fear in death itself? Mark Twain put it well: “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

Shaker

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Re: Looking Death In The Face
« Reply #6 on: December 27, 2016, 01:20:52 PM »
Twain also said: "Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world."
Pain, or damage, don't end the world. Or despair, or fucking beatings. The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man, and give some back. - Al Swearengen, Deadwood.

Walter

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Re: Looking Death In The Face
« Reply #7 on: December 30, 2016, 11:07:06 AM »
Twain also said: "Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world."
I loved his version of 'Old man river' too. ;)

Anchorman

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Re: Looking Death In The Face
« Reply #8 on: December 30, 2016, 12:07:41 PM »
If Death has a Klatchian curry and a saddle for two, then, hey. hi, big man!
"for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom - for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself."

Brownie

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Re: Looking Death In The Face
« Reply #9 on: December 30, 2016, 09:27:51 PM »
You look after yourself, Keith.  Sleep well and, if you feel like it, seek some good, gentle company.
Let us profit by what every day and hour teaches us