Drawing Conclusions

 “To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death… We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere.” —Michel de Montaigne

Montaigne also famously wrote that to philosophize is to learn to die.  We are after all mortal beings, very much defined by our perceptions of death.  In examining disasters like the Great Irish Famine, or Hurricane Katrina, or the Lisbon Earthquake, we are directly confronted with the notion of mortality and we feel the need to celebrate the victims’ humanities so as to ascribe meaning in death.  Let us not shy away from examining such horrible occurrences, because in doing so, we examine ourselves and our own humanity.  We are at once the receivers of our predecessors’ legacies and motors of tomorrow’s world.  We need to embrace others’ deaths in a therapeutic manner, respectful of each other’s basic human rights, yet must not fear death itself.

(Or perhaps that was just my personal experience in Writing Sem.)