Mortality and Life. This event will be held at Clock Tower in Westboro

Please arrive at 6:45pm to order your drinks/food so that we can start the event at 7pm with minimum interruption. Thank you.

We will all die. Unlike (we believe) animals, we know that we will die. How does, and how should, this awareness of mortality change the way we lead our lives?

Some possible answers:

1. "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die." We must get as much pleasure from life a we can, since life is limited. Or, as Irving Berlin wrote,

"There may be trouble ahead,
But while there's moonlight, and music,
And love and romance,
Let's face the music and dance."

2. Enjoy particularly refined pleasures, such as appreciating the cherry blossoms:

"Out of my three score and ten,
Twenty will not come again.
From seventy years remove a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom,
Fifty years are little room,
About the woodland I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow." A.E. Housman

This might suggest we should study literature, or listen to music, or appreciate art of any kind.

3. Since we will die, we should love one another, as Berlin also suggests above. Charles Bukowski takes a pessimistic view of this possibility: “We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
4. Be intelligent and aware about what we do. Michel de Montaigne wrote, following Cicero, "to do philosophy is to learn how to die." The fact that we will die should induce us to reflect on what is worthwhile in life, and seek a consistent approach to living a worthwhile life. Similarly, in Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie: "'The truth is, Mitch,' he said, 'once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.'"
5. As a corollary of the above, the awareness of death should lead us to stop seeking what is only superficially valuable: money, sex, fame, and so on. The awareness of death should teach us what is only foolishness.
6. Seek what is eternal, whether God or Nirvana. Bailey Gillespie writes, "The American dream tells me I can have and do whatever my heart wants, but often what my heart wants is outside my control and slips through my fingers. It is like those grasses of the field. What endures is the life to come, our eternal inheritance that is sturdy and true and real enough to last." But George Orwell mocks this idea in Animal Farm:

“Up there, comrades," he would say solemnly, pointing to the sky with his large beak– "up there, just on the other side of that dark cloud that you can see– there it lies, Sugarcandy Mountain, that happy country where we poor animals shall rest for ever from our labours!" He even claimed to have been there on one of his higher flights, and to have seen the everlasting fields of clover and the linseed cake and lump sugar growing on the hedges. Many of the animals believed him. Their lives now, they reasoned, were hungry and laborious; was it not right and just that a better world should exist somewhere else?”