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My Own Death

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2024

Robert F. Hobson
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Extract

Deal on, Deal on, my merry men all

Deal on your cakes and your wine;

For whatever is dealt at her funeral today

Shall be dealt tomorrow at mine.

(Verse at an Irish Wake in 1810)

One day I shall be dead.

The thought came upon me suddenly, about half-way through a seemingly endless discussion of high medical politics. My mind wandered. This speculative essay is an attempt to make some general sense out of my personal relatively free association, with its clash of clever talk and chaotic emotion.

At first, the sentence ‘One day I shall be dead’ provided a subject for an entertaining philosophical word-game. I reflected upon the peculiar logic of the sentence—about how there could be any sense in which an experiencing T is in a state of being dead. I recalled the annoyingly opaque remark of Ludwig Wittgenstein: ‘As in death, too, the world does not change but ceases. Death is not an event in life. Death cannot be lived through.’

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 51 , Issue 605 , October 1970 , pp. 469 - 479
Copyright
Copyright © 1970 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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