• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • CommentGo Back
Download
 
Guy YedwabVictoria Anderson10/4/06It Can't Be AvoidedHere I am.I'm climbing up the sparse white staircase in the front hall of my friend's house. Where is he?“Pham, are we ready to go?”Pham is not ready to go. He is still on the phone, leaning heavily against the black-painted ironrailing overlooking me on the staircase. He's not speaking. He hangs up, and drops the phone to thefloor—a move which, in movies, makes absolute sense, but doesn't make sense in real life.“Pham?”“He's dead. He's gone and killed himelf,” Pham replies, with the bitter edge of a woundedanimal.“Who? What?”“Garrett. They found him dead. The fucker...”You don't get to choose when you start thinking about death. You never choose when you startthinking about death. Something comes and kicks you in the gut. Usually it's blatant, impossible toignore, as portrayed in Tatsuya Ishida in the comic
Sinfest 
:
 
It happens over and over again. When my friend Garrett Bryant overdosed on left-over  painkillers, I had a lot of time to think about death and mortality—it was, after all, spring break. Morerecently, I suddenly found another kick to the stomach that made me start thinking about death again: a photograph hung in the lobby of the Tisch building.It's a photo of a girl trapped in the moment of her death, sprawled in bed, an empty cup of teatossed by her side. She has died in a moment, by surprise. Whenever I walked by the photo, I felt the breath stolen from my lungs, felt my eyes lock with her blank ones. Who is she; why is she dead? Shedied sometime in the beginning of her life; what would she have done with her life if not for thisunfortunate accident?It was only very recently that I realized that this was the question of death that had bothered meequally with Garrett. I don't believe in God; a habit of not believing in God and a lack of anycompelling evidence to change my mind has made sure of that. So what becomes of Garret; what becomes of this girl in the photo? Has their life been wasted, is that it? Are they to simply rot away and become forgotten?Whenever my mind tries to wrap itself around that concept, I feel that same feeling; my breathis forced out and I feel hot and cold flashing through my body. I cannot bear the thought that I mightdie without having finished all of my dreams—my aspirations to creating art, my hopes of changing theface of history. The famous epitaph is “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” but I don't want to end up in thedust. I don't want to end up in the dust.I am more afraid of dying at the wrong time and amounting to nothing than simply death itself. Ihave no conception of death; as Rosencrantz says in
 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead 
, peopleimagine being dead as though they were still alive. You can't imagine deathness because it iscompletely outside the range of your experience, having been alive all your life. So I am absolutelyconfused as to how to approach death.My favorite philosopher, William James, addressed that very problem when he wrote about his
 
 philosophical school, pragmatism. He believed that we only reexamine our philosophy when our current world-view (all the ideas and connections we've collected so far) are unable to explainsomething. I can't explain death. I can't guess at how I'm going to react to it and all I can see of death— the end of my consciousness and the end of all I'm working towards—almost cripples me with fear.Once you begin to reexamine your philosophy, James says, you need to find the views and ideaswhich are most easily mixed into your current views and which help you solve the conundrum.When I'm lost, my eyes wander up to the bookshelf for inspiration from the great books whichhave already laid the foundation of my thought. That's where my eyes are right now: on the thin blueBarnes and Noble book with “Pragmatism – William James” written on the spine.I'm sitting at my desk, staring at these questions, feeling absolutely terrified. My iTunes is onshuffle, and out of some sort of perverse schadenfreude, is playing Nirvana's
 
“Lithium.” The grungesinger Kurt Kobain of Seattle is singing “I love you, I'm not coming back/I miss you, I'm not coming back.”My roommate, sitting behind me and dancing a little to acid rock, is not helping me think.Tapping my finger lightly on the keyboard as I think, I look back up at the books. I have somany books; I love to fill the empty spaces between my own thoughts with the thoughts of others. Andright now, my thoughts are filled with gaps to fill. I can almost imagine myself inside of the books,wandering through the paragraphs to find a conversation or passage of interest.Two Algerians are in a heated discussion. Tarrou is questioning the Doctor, Rieux, about why hehas been fighting the plague that has killed so many of their fellow townspeople, in hopes of figuringout his own view on death.“And then I had to see people die. Do you know that there are some people who
refuse
to die?Have you ever heard a woman scream 'Never!' with her last gasp?'” Dr. Rieux is saying.He finds it strange that some people refuse to die; I find it strange that some people throw
of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...