20 Famous Writers on Death and Mortality. Today marks the publication of Mortality, confrontational journalist Christopher Hitchens’ posthumous work about his experiences with the cancer that killed him. We’ve lost a lot of great minds recently — Nora Ephron, Maurice Sendak, David Rakoff, and Hitch himself — and we think this end-of-life memoir in essays, full of Hitchens’ trademark wit and his clear-eyed dissection of life as he sees it, may just heal us a little bit, as books tend to do.
To celebrate the book’s publication, and to help recalibrate our own perspectives on the loss of so many of our intellectual heroes, we’ve put together this selection of passages on death and mortality from a few of our favorite authors. Read through after the jump, and since there are an infinite number of these, add your own favorite to our collection in the comments. “Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. “Life was not a valuable gift, but death was.
Slavoj Zizek: 'Now the field is open' - Talk to Al Jazeera. From the Middle East to the streets of London and cities across the US there is a discontent with the status quo. Whether it is with the iron grip of entrenched governments or the widening economic divide between the rich and those struggling to get by. But where are those so hungry for change heading? How profound is their long-term vision to transform society? Slovenian-born philosopher Slavoj Zizek, whose critical examination of both capitalism and socialism has made him an internationally recognised intellectual, speaks to Al Jazeera's Tom Ackerman about the momentous changes taking place in the global financial and political system.
In his distinct and colourful manner, he analyses the Arab Spring, the eurozone crisis, the "Occupy Wall Street" movement and the rise of China. Concerned about the future of the existing western democratic capitalism Zizek believes that the current "system has lost its self-evidence, its automatic legitimacy, and now the field is open. " Harris and Pigliucci: On moral philosophy - Butterflies and Wheels.
Say what you will, Sam Harris knows how to stir a hive and send its inhabitants into a positive buzz. Some of them will turn this into an opportunity to get some intellectual exercise. Others may fly into a frenzy and sting at anything and everything, eventually disembowelling themselves intellectually in the process. Of the first, Brother Blackford (to co-opt a recently Coyned soubriquet) is a prime example: his ruminations are clearly valuable to the discussion. But where clarity is its own reward, the contributions of others need to be carefully disentangled from their ill-conceived targets, in order that everybody may see clearly where they went off course. Massimo Pigliucci has thankfully supplied us with such an opportunity—one is tempted to say: again.
This opportunity then is not one to defend Harris’s book, The Moral Landscape (TML); he is a big guy and can take care of himself (and his ideas). Questions of ultimate ends are not amenable to direct proof. Three things.