Trial of the Will

[Hoosiernorm]

[Tinker]

Yeah, that's one of those maxims that's just utter bullshit.

[ansuchin]

[Demon of Undoing]

Having a good death is about a third of my aspirations for this life, and we never know if we are up to it until it happens. It's maybe the last statement we can make. I think on it often, and I don't have any sense of bravado about it. Whatever you think you bring to the table, death will bring more. That's just the point; it is the final and thorough vanquishing of every one of your best efforts.

[Ibrahim]

Read the Hitchens piece, seems to be more of an unpacking of Nietzsche's most famous quote, rather than a straight repudiation.

Depending on how you look at it, the concept is almost Buddhist in that you pare down your inner life to the bare essentials as your physical shell weakens and died, but Shopenhauer was the amateur Buddhist, not Nietzsche, and anyway I've seen plenty of ailing people lose their marbles as well as their physical capacities.

My more glib way of looking at it is that Hitchens, like all terminally ill people, are dying. So this isn't a case of "what doesn't kill you" so much as a case of what kills you slowly. Maybe John Milius had it right when he put the quote at the beginning of Conan the Barbarian. It's a macho thing, and the "doesn't kill you" was Arnold pushing that mill wheel for ten years to get all buff.

[Demon of Undoing]

So, then, what doesn't kill you puts you in wolverine-fur underwear?

[Tinker]

[ansuchin]

Well, whether in wolverine-fur or porcupine pants, or even in an elk burial robe, sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn't.

[lzzrdgrrl]

[Ibrahim]