💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › crimethinc-the-concealment-of-death.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 08:49:45. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: The Concealment Of Death Author: CrimethInc. Date: September 11, 2000 Language: en Topics: death Source: Retrieved on 7th November 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/the-concealment-of-death
Here’s an exercise to try at home. You will need a working stopwatch, or
another timepiece that measures seconds. Before you begin, seat yourself
in a comfortable chair and loosen your clothing.
Watch the second hand as it passes around the face of the clock. Picture
the moment of your death, perhaps many decades in the future, or perhaps
only a few years or months (who can know?). Wait for the second hand to
reach the starting point at the top of the clock face, and then watch as
it records the passing of one minute of your life. Now imagine the clock
counting down the minutes of your life to the moment of your death. Try
this exercise picturing this moment a few decades in the future, then
repeat it picturing the moment next year. Repeat it picturing the moment
of your death next month. Next week. Tonight. After all, you never know.
Now observe the minute and hour hands on the clock. What were you doing
at this time twenty four hours ago? Forty eight hours ago? One month
ago? What will you be doing at this time in a week?
Imagine that the moment of your death is one month away. Consider–if you
knew that this was true, what would you be doing right now? What would
you be doing at this time tomorrow? Repeat this step, imagining your
death to be one year away. Does this make very much difference in your
thoughts about what you would do today and tomorrow if you knew the date
of your death?
Compare your activities over the last twenty four hours to the
activities you would have chosen if you had known that you would leave
this world in one month or one year. Compare your activities over the
last month, the last year, the last decade to those you would have
chosen if you had known that on this day you would have only thirty days
or twelve months left to live. How different would your life have been
if you had known the date of your approaching death? Would you be ready
to die in a month or a year, having lived the life that you have?
Chances are, at least as far as we all know, that most of the people who
read this text and participate in this exercise will live for many more
years or even decades afterwards. But still, look at the second hand of
the stopwatch, and follow it as it records the passing minutes, counting
down the minutes of your life that remain to you as they slip away. Are
you living the life that you want to live? Are you living a life that,
at any given moment, you could look back upon with satisfaction if you
suddenly realized that it was about to end? Are you living the sort of
life that you would wish upon a human being, a life that is exciting and
full, a life that is well spent, every minute of it? If the answer is
no, what can you do in the time that still remains to you–however long
or short that may be–to make your life more like the life you would like
to live? For we all do have only a limited amount of time granted to us
in this world–and so we should use it with this in mind.
If you find, looking back upon your life, that you have spent years
living without any consideration of your mortality, this is really not
unusual. For our social/cultural environment does not encourage us to
think much about the limits that nature places on our lives. Death and
aging are denied and hidden away as if they were shameful and
embarrassing. The older members of our society are hidden away in
“retirement homes” like lepers in leper colonies. The billboards,
magazine photos, and television commercials that meet our eyes at every
turn show only images of healthy men and women in the prime of their
life. Cemeteries, which once memorialized the dead and preserved a place
for them in the thoughts of the living, are now forgotten in abandoned
neighborhoods and overgrown with weeds. When a man dies, the rituals
which once would have celebrated his life and brought the subject of
human mortality to the thoughts of those who survived him are now often
regarded as mere inconveniences. Death is impolite and embarrassing, it
is considered bad etiquette, for there is no place for it in today’s
busy world of corporate mergers and record-breaking conspicuous
consumption. Our busy schedules and glossy magazines neither make
allowance for it nor offer any explanation of how it might be relevant
to our value system or our lives.
And indeed if we were to stop and ponder the subject, perhaps we would
find that when we seriously consider the limits of our time on this
planet, keeping up with television comedies and having a good sum seem
less important than they did before. Our cultural silence about human
mortality allows us to forget how much weight the individual moments of
our lives carry, adding up as they do to our lives themselves. Thus we
may squander countless hours watching television or balancing
checkbooks–hours that in retrospect we might have done better to have
spent walking on the sea shore with our loved ones, cooking gourmet
meals for our children or friends, writing fiction, or hitchhiking
across South America. The reality of our future death is not easy for
any of us to come to terms with, but it is surely better that we
consider this now than regret not doing so later when it is too late.
Our modern denial of death has a deeper significance, beyond its
functions as a reaction to our fear of mortality and a selective
blindness that helps to preserve the status quo. It is a symptom of our
ongoing struggle to escape from the cycles of change in nature and
establish an unnatural permanence in the world. Our mortality is
frightening evidence that we do not have control over everything, and as
such we are quick to ignore it, if we cannot do away with it
altogether–a feat towards which our medical researchers are slowly
working. It is worth questioning whether this would even be desirable.
Since the dawn of Western civilization, men and women have hungered for
domination not only of the world and each other, but also for domination
of the seasons, of time itself. We speak of the eternal grandeur of our
gods and empires, and we design our cities and corporations to exist
into infinity. We build monuments, skyscrapers, which we intend to stand
forever as testimony of our victory over the sands of time. But this
victory can only come at a price, at this price: that though nothing
passes away, nothing comes to be, either–that the world we create is a
static, standardized world that can hold no surprises for us any more.
We would do well to be wary of fulfilling our own darkest dreams by
creating such a dystopia, a frozen world in which no one must fear death
any more, for everyone exists forever and no one lives for even an
instant.