The experiences associated with death were seen as visits to important dimensions of reality that deserved to be experienced, studied, and carefully mapped.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Mortal experiences give us the opportunity to assess what we are doing with our lives.
It's not the normal way to look at things but I experienced death at a really young age and because of that it's been part of my mental landscape that death is really very possible.
Facing my own death brought an instant sense of clarity and purpose.
I had spent so much time studying literature at Stanford and the history of medicine at Cambridge in an attempt to better understand the particularities of death, only to come away feeling like they were still unknowable to me.
When you look at death, it makes you understand the importance of the moment when you have life and death in front of you, and you witness seeing someone deteriorating in front of you - it's an overwhelming experience. If you don't learn from that, I don't know what else you're gonna learn.
The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear... What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away... We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities.
I'm not very interested in charting a day-to-day familiar reality. I'm always looking for territory in which to explore the BIG subjects, the life-or-death stories.
It is only in the light of the inescapable fact of death that a person can adequately engage and enter upon the mysterious fact of life.
No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.
It is like visiting one's funeral, like visiting loss in its purest and most monumental form, this wild darkness, which is not only unknown but which one cannot enter as oneself.
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