light bulb in my mouth

[perlmonger]

Watching Andrew Marr’s programme about Hume and Edinburgh last night, and Hume’s acceptance of his mortality, left me thinking about death.

I’m with Hume on this; my only concerns about dying are of what difficulties and upset will be left for those who survive me and, inevitably, for things I’ll leave undone. I don’t want to stop being, because (these days; it was not always so) I mostly like be-ing, but ceasing to be has no fears in and of itself.

What I have noticed though, in the last year or so, is occasionally thinking that I won’t buy a book or a DVD because it feels a waste; because I’ll likely die before I get round to reading/watching the thing more than once. Something in my psyche is regarding the likely twenty-odd, possible thirty or forty years I have left as being a perceptibly approaching end. This, at least, I’m not sure I like: intellectually, I’d rather just carry on living in something close to the now and, well, just stop one day.

There. I’ll probably get eaten by the cats tomorrow :)

Comments

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

I find it goes in waves; some years I think a lot about not-being and then it evaporates for years and then it triggers again (obvious reason this year) and I do mental sums (will another 40 years be enough). tanais had the 'I'll never read all those books in my lifetime' downer the first time he went into the Bodleian at about 24 so it's either a quantity issue - or possibly the quality of the book/dvd vs the monetary and temporal cost - as much as an age one...