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As a person approaches late adulthood, health problems are not just the issue, but problems regarding one’s meaning of life. Both of these men felt unsatisfied or incomplete, with their overall feeling, they were both suffering from a terminal disease, and they both felt if they were going to die they wanted die knowing they got the best out of life, with no regrets, and lived life to the fullest.…
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Thesis Statement: There is a human aspiration to live forever and a way to cope with this belief is through symbolic immortality that is presented in Hal Duncan’s work of death and resurrection. These fictional stories, folklores, and myths were a hero survived death or is resurrected, place a claim to one’s own humanity in accepting the concept of death and behind these tales of the dead/rebirth is the sorrow of the living. The living is the one that is struck the most with the death of a loved one, sorrow and grief accompanies this loss and the belief of transcending death and symbolic immortality, somehow helps the living to accept this loss and allows them to move…
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In “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality”, Bernard Williams argues that immortality is undesirable because one would achieve one’s categorical desires which will cause one to become bored and find immortality undesirable. In this paper, I will argue that this argument fails because if one lives a recognizably human life, they will experience memory decay thus allowing them to repeat the same categorical desires without becoming bored. In addition, if one must experience immortality in a recognizably human form then they and everything and everyone else around them will be, therefore giving the one with an eternal life a constant task of trying to perfect everything and everyone (mortals).…
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This essay was originally written in February of 1996 for a composition class that I took at a local community college while completing my third and final year of high school. The original text has been edited to correct spelling and grammar. In truth, this essay is more of a collaboration between Betsy and I. She had take the class from the same instructor the year before. Many of the concepts discussed are largely extrapolations and enhancements of ideas she expressed. She got a B+ on her version; I got an A on mine :).…
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Therefore, this will is shared by Hamlet and Plato. They both discuss about death and give their own opinion. They agree with the comparison between death and act of sleeping. These conditions are similar, in the opinion of the authors, because of the lack of consciousness. As a consequence, men are attracted by a sense of curiosity and allurement, but these feelings are shared with two opposite reactions.…
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Ideas: This is much more a critical thinking exercise than anything else. You must come to a good understanding of the readings and focus on one essential point. It is important to note that no one is asking for my viewpoint on life and death. I am being asked to write a literary essay. This means that I must present the viewpoints of the authors as presented in these two particular works.…
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In William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet the audience is regularly confronted with the abstract notion that life is ephemeral. This notion is depicted through several scenes, during the confrontation between Hamlet and Laertes when the queen dies, the ‘to be or not to be’ soliluquoy and when Hamlet is conversing with the gravedigger. During these scenes William Shakespeare portrays themes that are still relevant to this day’s society.…
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Woody Allen once said, “I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.” Allen refers not to living longer in age, but his memory living on and never being forgotten. John Donne, in Death Be Not Proud (Holy Sonnet 10), expresses the same logic, saying Death is not something to be afraid of and how the speaker has dominated it. Donne uses anthropomorphism, figurative language, and tone to show readers death is vulnerable and it is easily taken over with willpower.…
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Death is inevitable. No matter how much an individual clings to life hoping and wishing to escape death, death always follows. Yet, in the presence of those who cling to life, there are individuals who accept that death is a part of life. Those individuals realize that from the moment of birth death is inevitable. In light of these two polar responses to death I find it important to try to understand the concept of “good death.” For the purpose of this short essay I will not dive into whether death is good. For now I will only explore the fluidity of “good death” by highlighting specific attitudes that have endured over the past 150 years and offer personal suggests for why I think these attitudes have persisted.…
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Death is a personal event that man cannot describe for himself. As far back as we can tell, man has been both intrigued by death and fearful of it; he has been motivated to seek answers to the mystery and to seek solutions to his anxiety. Every known culture has provided some answer to the meaning of death; for death, like birth or marriage, is universally regarded as a socially significant…
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As long as humans have lived and died, we have strived to know the meaning of life. We assume that there is a meaning or importance to life, and in doing so try to provide some permanence to our existence so that a greater machine might continue to function. It is only natural, then, for us to be interested in the concept of immortality. If there is purpose to an ending life, a life that does not end must be supremely important. This idea is exemplified throughout time in stories both historical and fictional. The Epic of Gilgamesh is one such story. Gilgamesh deals with immortality on nearly every level, and at the same time points back to mortality, trying to extract a reason for living and dying.…
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On the eve of the narrator and his family 's departure for the United States after twelve years of residence in Paris, the narrator is being chided by his wife and visiting sister about his nightmares. He is worried about his return to the racist United States after such a long absence and what effect it will have on his multiracial family and his career.…
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The search for immortality seems to be an obsession for many men and women all throughout history. In the Epic of Gilgamesh a man investigates the possibility of immortality following the saddening death of his friend, his brother Enkidu. That man, Gilgamesh, feeling the fear of the possibility of his own mortality which was before unrealized before the death of Enkidu, searches for a way to preserve himself.…
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Dying may be seen by many as a burden, but in Hans Jonas’s article, “The Burden and Blessing of Mortality,” dying is analyzed as not only a burden but also a blessing. By employing rhetorical modes such as division, definition, and illustration, Jonas paints a beautiful picture of how one should view death and the many views in which one can look at its foreboding shadow.…
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Does death give meaning to life? One might wonder how something so morbid could bring meaning to “life”, which is supposedly something more pleasant and sound. Bernard Williams was an English philosopher in the 20th century who suggests that death gives meaning to life, and that immortality might not be something that one should desire and wish for (Jacobsen, 104). In the average human life, everyone has many different desires that bring meaning and purpose to that life. There are conditional desires, unconditional desires and categorical desires, and all of these desires bring meaning and interest to our lives. Conditional desires are things we want to do if we live long enough, like travel the world when we retire for example.…
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