- "Death is everything
And it is nothing
The worms crawl in and the worms crawl out"
What a way to start a book!
And what an excellent book it was! - and on a topic that most people would not readily want to read about - death. But, as I discovered, the book was certainly more that just about death - it is also about living, friends and about influencing others.
I was particularly intrigued with chapter 4 and Epicuris's arguments:
1. The mortality of the soul (the soul is mortal and perishes with the body)
2. The ultimate nothingness of death ("why fear death when we can never perceive it" - because we are dead and have no consciousness)
3. The argument of symmetry ("our state of non-being after death is the same state we were in before our birth),
Other interesting notes:
- the "remembered"dead and the "truly"dead- country cemeteries (pg. 179)
I like Yalom's discussion about religion, meaning and morality which he explains that religion does not hold an exclusive right to the concepts of meaning and morality.
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Staring at the Sun