how to live knowing we will die?

I will try to translate the resume from BNF conference that Marc Goldstein wrote some days ago. I found the ideas more than interesting and I learned many things.

Nicolas Grimaldi talked about life and death that night.

He started by formulating directly the question: how do we know we are going to die? We thing in death indirectly, it is not my death, is something that happens to others not to me. Because death is perceived like an event, we think in death like a risk, something ordinary.

The representation of death.

How can we pretend to represent something that has no representation? Because deaths representation is impossible we have an interior frustration or a void of death representation. So we need to make a choice. We can choose to live in a dimension of representation or in a dimension of reality. Representation is a choice similar to a piece of theatre, the image we want to show to others. Representation is opposed to perception that characterizes reality; observation, the use of our senses. Perception is sensation and feeling. When the pleasure of senses decreases is because the death comes to us and corrupts our perceptions with the ideal of eternity.

Life of extremes passes without perception: gambling, orgasm and shopping. Those instant pleasures are anesthesia for perception. The present is enchanted by the future. The sense of life is then dissipated by representation.

One way to cover the void is to get busy or to forget that time passes. The more we get busy the more we forget about life. Another way is linked to representation, we need to get visible to others, by playing a role; to imitate in stead of using our senses. Its easier to see the role of others in life rather than search for ours.

Learning the sense of life is to learn not to fear death.