A very fine piece of writing by Jody Bottum at the First Things blog:

Once, while I was teaching one of those Logic 101 courses with which philosophy graduate students try to pay the bills, a student asked why we couldn´t follow an infinite regress out infinitely, and I answered, in the snide way of philosophy graduate students, that, if nothing else, death would manage to stop us. What followed, however, took my breath away, for a student in the back raised his hand and announced that he wasn´t going to die, since medical science would cure whatever it was he was going to die before he got old enough to die. And most of the rest of that class of eighteen year olds nodded in agreement. It was one of those moments all teachers know—a proposition so wrong you don´t have any idea how to begin to correct it.

Still, even for eighteen year olds, I didn´t really believe that they didn´t know they were going to die. Mortality is an ache deep in the bone. Death whispers in the blood. Though personal death is not something any human being has ever actually experienced—my completed death cannot be an event in my life, after all—still, from the death of a childhood pet to the death of a parent, the black knowledge has been forced upon the brain. Every mother gives birth astride an open grave, as Samuel Beckett put it. That is perhaps the bleakest imaginable picture of human life, but at some level or another, we all know it´s true.

Read it all, as they say.

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