We Are Creating Ripples Through Time (Book Review)
NOTE: This mini-essay originally appeared in my free email course on books and literature, which you can sign up for (free, of course) by clicking here. Over 1,500 other book-lovers have already signed up!
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Good morning!
Today’s book is called Staring at the Sun, by Irvin D. Yalom.
Yalom is right up there with Rollo May as someone I’ve been meaning to read for a long time but always put off.
I still haven’t gotten around to May, but Irvin Yalom is an existential psychotherapist (basically co-developed the field, and even wrote the definitive textbook on it) who is very interested in how people cope with death, both their own and that of the people they love.
Staring at the Sun examines the subconscious fear of death, the strategies people employ in order to escape the idea of death, as well as the experiences of his patients and friends as they work through their deepest existential terror.
Official opinion: One of the best books I’ve read so far in 2019 (out of 50-something).
Other recent highlights have been Love in the Void, by Simone Weil, and Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit, by Steven Pressfield. Both excellent.
But today is all about Yalom.
So, let’s get started!
Today’s Book on Amazon: Staring at the Sun, by Irvin D. Yalom
FROM MY NOTES:
Gilgamesh: “Sorrow enters my heart. I am afraid of death.”
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“Many adolescents today may respond to death anxiety by becoming masters and dispensers of death in their second life in violent video games.”
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Dark humor, risk-taking behavior, horror movies, all transmute the subconscious fear of death into something more manageable
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Plato: “We cannot lie to the deepest part of ourselves.”
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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety. The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.
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Sartre: “The last burst of my heart would be inscribed on the last page of my work and death would be taking only a dead man.”
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Death: “The impossibility of further possibility.”
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A confrontation with death arouses anxiety but also has the potential of vastly enriching life
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Everything we do matters, because we are always creating ripples through time
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“Become who you are.”
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Hemingway: “We become stronger in the broken places.”
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Woman who worked at a children’s shelter for AIDS sufferers: “I never let them die alone in the dark.”
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“You can take with you from this world nothing that you have received; you can take only what you have given.”
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It’s never too late. You’re never too old.
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“Someday, the solar system will lie in ruins.”
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“Certainly there will come a time when the last living person who has ever known me dies.”
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“An old person — every old person — is the last repository of the image of many people. When the very old die, they each take a multitude with them.”
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You cannot make new old friends
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“Everything will evaporate into thin air, leaving nothing except carbon atoms drifting in the darkness.”
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Dylan Thomas: “Though lovers die, love survives.”
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“How staggeringly lucky I am to be here, alive, and luxuriating in the pleasure of sheer being!”
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“We humans are the only creatures for whom our own existence is the problem.”
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The therapeutic act is far more effective than the therapeutic word
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Ultimately self-deception catches up with us
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One of my favorite poems (it might actually just be a fragment, come to think of it) comes from Virgil, and it goes like this:
“Death twitches my ear, “Live,” he says. “I am coming.”’
Almost everyone you know would do anything to stop the creeping advance of death, to counter the inevitable ending of everything they’ve ever known, instead of staring at the sun.
Staring at the sun means of course to stop running, to resist the urge to avert one’s gaze from the terrible necessities of life. It means to live the rest of one’s life standing up, rather than hiding with one’s head in the sand.
This, as you can probably guess, is one of the hardest things for any of us to do. We don’t want to die, we want to keep on living, forever and ever (or at least we think we do).
People start businesses, they make money, they try and get their names in the papers, they build skyscrapers, they have children, they kill other people…on and on…all to escape the idea that they themselves will one day leave the earth.
I used to think that all that was pretty pathetic. And sure, I still think that in most cases it is. Fear is not deserving of respect, and anything that comes as a result of fear must of necessity be undeserving of respect.
But I don’t think every one of the acts I have described, at least not in all cases, comes from a place of fear.
Same action, different mindset and motivation.
It’s clear that some people set out to make a lot of money because they’re afraid. They have nothing but emptiness to offer, so they need money (or anything else) to fill it. So they go out and make a bunch of money in order to fill that emptiness.
But others, while rich themselves, have set out to make their fortune as a natural consequence of their, shall I say, “fullness of being”.
Life is their motive power, not death.
You can see the difference between these people if you pay close enough attention. Same action, different mindset and motivation. And different attitudes towards existence.
The fullness of their lives extends outwards, creating ripples through time, and makes the world…better. I wish that same fullness of being for you as well.
We can develop that fullness, but it doesn’t grow in the shade.
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
NOTE: This mini-essay originally appeared in my free email course on books and literature, which you can sign up for (free, of course) by clicking here. Over 1,500 other book-lovers have already signed up!
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