Articles on ‘Speculations and Muses’

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In death’s vicinity

24 Jun 2010

I’m currently reading “A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War : Russia, 1941-1944″, a unique testimony from Willy Peter Reese, a German soldier in WWII, of the horrors of the Eastern Front. Death is a constant and terrible presence throughout the author’s time there; he also eventually in 1944 fell to this [...]

“Overcoming death”

22 Jun 2010

Dear Gloria,
Thanks for your reflections on Charles’ blog entry “Sad – ha ha”. May I respond….
In my own comments on this blog entry I was talking about overcoming death itself – not our fear of it.
For the vast majority, claiming to have overcome the fear of it would be a pure lie. If we could [...]

Understanding DeathMatters better

14 Jun 2010

I’m stimulated to this post by Charles Cowling’s review of DeathMatters on his Good Funeral Guide Blog.
Charles, I’m pleased that you seem to have mostly understood what I’m aiming at with DeathMatters – reawakening an awareness of death as a way of living better and remembering better. (But you should also have specified “living more [...]

The myth of progress and the reality of death

5 Jun 2010

“How did we get to this stage?” – a comment on my last blog (Death matters – no kidding!) from Charles of The Good Funeral Guide, whose excellent blog I often visit.
Indeed, how did we get to the point that one actually has to be reminded that death still matters?
This is obviously a complex question, [...]

Death matters – no kidding!

1 Jun 2010

What a sign of the times,  that giving this name to my blog should not be ridiculous!
For what could have been more obvious in every other epoch of history that death mattered! Of all things. That it mattered as much as being born, as getting married, as choosing a career, as making a living. In [...]

Ye Mortals!

3 May 2010

When I was writing the mission statement for this site some time ago (”Medicine for LIFE“), I used the words mortality and mortals extensively. It occurs to me now how unfashionable these words have become, particularly the latter.
In ancient literature, particularly in mythologies where humans existed alongside gods, titans, demons and other immortals, humans were [...]

I’m happy to be alive!

28 Apr 2010

In a recent discussion about perservering through all the difficulties of life, I retorted at one point, “But in the end, the only thing that really matters is not dying. Anything is better than that”. To which was answered, “Are you sure? What if one suffers terribly?” I realized my mistake -  what really [...]

Damming the river of life

21 Apr 2010

It has long astonished me how clever we have become about eliminating the visibility (that is to say, the reminders) of death in our modern world.
This has not happened only by chance and greater competition for space from “life enterprises” – there is deep subconscious death denial at work here, manifesting [...]

Death as Liberation

23 Feb 2010

In my humble opinion, this famous contemporary vision of death’s “value” mostly misses the mark.
But with a minor correction, it gains profound new meaning. From the soul’s perspective, death can be seen as a liberation – hence its pricelessness.

Art, death and the obvious

3 Feb 2010

“Death? It’s the only thing we haven’t succeeded in completely vulgarizing!” Aldous Huxley
Seeing this provocative phrase atop one of the pages of the Perpetua’s Passages site made me pick up Huxley’s excellent compilation of essays on art again, “On Art and Artists”. Although I didn’t find the source of the quote there, I did find [...]


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