溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
If We Learn Death in Advance, Are We Freed from the Fear of It?
Rather than straining to look away from death, does growing familiar with it by reckoning it often, in advance, in fact free us from its dread?
To philosophize is to learn how to die. For one who has reckoned death in advance, death loses its strangeness and its dread.
This question split whether to learn death in advance or to live forgetting it. Montaigne at first, following the Stoics and Cicero, said "philosophy is the rehearsal of death" and bade one grow familiar with it by frequent reckoning — for the familiar is not fearful. Seneca's "rehearsal of death" and Plato's "Phaedo" were its roots. Yet as he aged Montaigne softened this posture of his own accord — rather than straining to rehearse death, he came to trust that nature, as it does the peasant, would teach the way of dying when the time came. Is death a skill to be practiced all one's life, or a natural course nature will teach of itself — within one man these two answers grew side by side, and that very change shows the ripening of the human heart toward death.
In an age that lives pushing the end from thought, Montaigne's question — reckoning it often lessens the dread — teaches a way to govern death not by evasion but by familiarity.
Montaigne believed that thinking often of death, far from darkening life, frees it.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Montaigne believed that thinking often of death, far from darkening life, frees it. Since we do not know where death awaits us, let us await it everywhere; reckoning it often in advance lessens both its strangeness and its dread when it comes. For the familiar is not fearful. Later he softened this posture, holding that rather than forcibly rehearsing death, nature would teach it when the time came. I sense this question governs fear not by evasion but by familiarity. What one faces often becomes, before long, no longer frightening. I stand before this question too, practicing little by little to keep calmly beside me the end I have strained to push away.
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