One Beat More

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Kevin Aho. One Beat More

CONTENTS

Guide

Pages

One Beat More. Existentialism and the Gift of Mortality

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction To Learn How to Die

Notes

1 Death-Man

Notes

2 Letting Go

Notes

3 A Chasm of Stillness

Notes

4 The World Has Become Smaller

Notes

5 Be the Poet of Your Life

Notes

6 The World in All Its Terror

Notes

7 This Life Countless Times

Notes

8 Held Out into Nothing

Notes

Appendix The Existentialists

Bibliography

Index. A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

R

S

T

U

V

W

Y

Z

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Отрывок из книги

Kevin Aho

Shidō Bunan (1603–1676)

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But Kierkegaard believes that this “convenient and comfortable” life is itself the greatest form of despair; it is the despair of self-deception, of “not wanting to be oneself, of wanting to be rid of oneself.”13 And the myriad ways in which we lie to ourselves about death are all too familiar. We believe in the immortality of the soul and an afterlife. We have children, in the hope of living on in them after we’re gone. We accumulate wealth, publish books, and produce works of art that will leave a lasting mark. We obsess about fitness and diet and cosmetically alter our physical appearance in our efforts to stay young. We treat aging and death as medical problems that can be solved with new treatments and technologies. We believe in our own specialness: death may happen to others, but it can’t possibly happen to me. We even avoid using the word “death” altogether, because of the singular horror it evokes. In his famous story The Death of Ivan Ilych, the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy captures this deep-seated avoidance through his titular character, a shallow everyman suddenly stricken with a terminal illness who is in such a state of denial that he can speak of death only from a detached, third-person standpoint, as a nameless “It” that stalks him. As the illness progresses, his futile attempts to depersonalize death become more desperate.

Ivan Ilych would turn his attention to it and try to drive the thought of it away, but without success. It would come and stand before him and look at him, and he would be horrified, and the light would die out of his eyes, and he would again begin asking himself whether It alone was true … He would go to his study, lie down, and again be alone with It: face to face with It. And nothing could be done with It except to look at it and shudder.14

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