"Things as certain as death and taxes, can be more firmly believed."Benjamin Franklin used the form we are currently more familiar with, in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy, 1789 (which was re-printed in The Works of Benjamin Franklin, 1817):
"In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."Ryan Anderson:
The NRO web briefing and Yuval Levin draw our attention to today’s column by David Brooks. And rightly so. As Yuval points out, our modern pursuit of health as “the primary good” is making it almost impossible to prevent it “from overwhelming every other good” and bankrupting us in the process.But there is an unsettling oddity about Brooks’ column. He opens by uncritically praising Dudley Clendinen’s essay, “The Good Short Life,” in The Times’s Sunday Review section. And he closes by recommending three other essays:
. . . let me provide links to three other essays, which offer other perspectives on why we should accept the finitude of life and the naturalness of death. They are: “Born Toward Dying,” by Richard John Neuhaus, “L’Chaim and Its Limits: Why Not Immortality?” by Leon Kass and “Thinking About Aging,” by Gilbert Meilaender.
But all three of these authors would firmly reject the central argument advanced by Clendinen: that his life will soon no longer be worth living:
I have a plan. If I get pneumonia, I’ll let it snuff me out. If not, there are those other ways. I just have to act while my hands still work: the gun, narcotics, sharp blades, a plastic bag, a fast car, over-the-counter drugs, oleander tea (the polite Southern way), carbon monoxide, even helium. That would give me a really funny voice at the end.
I have found the way. Not a gun. A way that’s quiet and calm.
I've come close to death three or four times and, according to the bible, I've only got another 6 years before I kick the bucket at the allotted span of three score and ten. So I'm getting a bit more sanguine about death every day.
It has also become clear to me that "dialectical materialism" (as Marx termed communism/socialism) is based on a fear of death - actually a fear of reality in all it's forms. Hence the fallacy that food, housing and "health-care" are rights along with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - as well as handsome husbands, obedient children, fluffy pets and gardens full of flowers, butterflies, rainbows and unicorns.