you bloody fools

on the telegraph, godless in tumourville:

snip

has he ever shared larkin’s yearning for faith?

'no,’ he says. 'there isn’t the evidence and i don’t see why anyone would want it to be true. a permanent, invigilated, regulated dictatorship which you are told is for your own good. i can’t think of anything worse.’

and does he share larkin’s fear of death?

he cannot pretend that he hasn’t been giving this some thought lately. but he approaches the matter elliptically. the philosopher david hume, he says, said you are not afraid of the time before you were born when there was nothingness, so why should you be any more concerned afterwards? 'lucretius put it more simply, saying you’re not going to know you’re dead so there’s nothing to be afraid of. what larkin was saying was, you bloody fools; that’s exactly what i’m afraid of – annihilation.’ he pauses. 'it is a disagreeable thought.’

/snip

hitchens expressed these thoughts in hitch 22, and they've been mine as well since i was a young girl. leave it to hitchens to find others' thoughts and bring them together so well.  i find so few people who understand this.

do you?

when i was reading his memoir, i was moved to take this picture. i don't know why.  i hadn't planned it out, but immediately, i saw it and knelt down to capture it.  to me, it expressed my recession from life:

aubade

please click
this is a special way of being afraid
no trick dispels. religion used to try,
that vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
created to pretend we never die,
and specious stuff that says no rational being
can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
that this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
no touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
nothing to love or link with,
the anasthetic from which none come round.
- philip larkin

a 14 year old understood.

----------
a friend just finished up an apartment she intends to rent. i jumped at the chance to shoot the emptiness.
[interested?]

©2010 helen sotiriadis

christopher hitchens on anderson cooper 360 on CNN, extended edition

on CNN:



thanks to daily hitchens

hitchens on mortality

at the atlantic:



via daily hitchens

christopher hitchens on anderson cooper 360 on CNN

EDIT: watch the extended edition here.

here's a snip:

AC: in a moment of doubt, isn't there... i don't know... i just find it fascinating that... even when you're alone, and you know that no one else is watching that there might be a moment where you, you know, want to hedge your bets...

CH: if that comes, it'll be when i'm very ill, when i'm half-demented, either by drugs or by pain and i won't have control over what i say. i mention this in case you eve hear a rumor later on, because these things happen and the faithful love to spread these rumors. you know, 'on his death bed, he finally...' well, i can't say that the entity that, by then, wouldn't be me, wouldn't do such a pathetic thing, but i can tell you that, not while i'm lucid, no. i could be quite sure of that.

AC: so if there is some story that, on your death bed...

CH: don't believe it. don't credit it, no.

on AC360°

reaching for immortality

on cosmic log:

'the quest for immortality goes back to adam and eve, but now some smart people are getting serious about actually bringing it within their grasp. and they're getting more attention as well.'

transcendent man film trailer:



'ultimately, we are information. i believe that we're fundamentally a pattern of information. there's an analogy to water in a stream. the pattern that water makes as it goes around a particular rock can be the same for years, but obviously the water is different from second to second. am i the same person that you talked to years ago? actually, the particles are completely different. the pattern isn't exactly the same, either, but the pattern does have continuity.

so we are a pattern of information. and that information, ultimately we'll be able to capture that. that's another aspect of extending our lives. right now we can back up all the valuable information we have on our computers. but it's not just a poem or a metaphor to say this information in our brains, it's very literally data, but we have no backup for it. ultimately we'll be able to back it up and retain it.'

-ray kurzweil

i was very excited to read this. i've often tried to tell my friends that we're waves... waves, streams, the analogy is similar.

i'm so glad people are getting serious about extending life... and i'm very puzzled as to why people are born, live, and die, and not spend more resources to answer these questions.

©2010 toomanytribbles

knife

verse that stabs like a knife, unleashing thoughts that have indiscreetely accompanied me daily for almost exactly 34 years:

the sure extinction that we travel to
and shall be lost in always. not to be here,
not to be anywhere,
and soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more
true...
and specious stuff that says no rational being
can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
that this is what we fear...

philip larkin's aubade, as quoted and emphasized by christopher hitchens in his memoir, hitch 22.

©2010 toomanytribbles

don't waste your fucking time

i found this on think and thwim who found it on 23 moments.

terry pratchett on alzheimer's and assisted dying

in 6 parts:

the manhattan beach project longevity summit

this is a playlist of videos i have not listened to yet... but am slowly working through them.



via next big future shared by jonathan shock

the passage back to the place she was before

clickable

one of the reasons i started the 365 project was to learn more about taking pictures, to become more appreciative of my world and my time and to have a bundle of memories for 2009.

this is one memory i didn't ever expect or want to have.

this is the picture of the door of the room at the hospital on my mother's final day.

i was alone with her for many hours and it might seem funny for me to be doing this, but it is my way of coping with the situation.

as the night fell deep, i got comfortable and held her hand, hoping that the monitors' rhythms would reassuringly remain stable until the morning,

but they didn't.

she hasn't passed away. she's not resting in peace. she's not in a better place and this didn't happen for a reason.

spare me any prayers.

zoe se olous mas*.



*life to us all.

daniel dennett - the genius of charles darwin: the uncut interviews

via RD

roger egbert on mortality

on the chicago sun times, via RD.

an amazing read:

'i don't expect to die anytime soon. but it could happen this moment, while i am writing. i was talking the other day with jim toback, a friend of 35 years, and the conversation turned to our deaths, as it always does. "ask someone how they feel about death," he said, "and they'll tell you everyone's gonna die. ask them, in the next 30 seconds? no, no, no, that's not gonna happen. how about this afternoon? no. what you're really asking them to admit is, oh my god, i don't really exist and i might be gone at any given second."'

read on....

no one, none of us, thinks deeply enough about this. if we did, we'd surely all go mad.