"“Death,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote, “is not an event in life.” He meant, maybe (for it’s hard to be sure—Wittgenstein was rather titanically cryptic), that being dead is not something we actually experience and that since we aren’t conscious of a nonliving state it is literally meaningless, so instead of spending our lives worrying about the future we should look at each instant as an eternity. We should live in the moment. Perhaps this is true, and wise, but in an ordinary sense Wittgenstein was completely wrong. Death is the event in life. It is our chief organizing principle. It’s why we rush and why we dawdle, why we better up our bosses and fawn over our children, why we like both fast cars and fading flowers, why we write poetry, why sex thrills us. It’s why we wonder why we are here."
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Non-fiction authors from the United StatesJournalists from the United StatesHistorians from the United StatesCritics from the United StatesPeople from Pennsylvania
Original Language: English
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Chapter 2 “Banquet of Bones” (p. 43)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Russell_Shorto
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Russell Shorto
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