Brief 1b (3)

Name : fledgeling
Subject : Fear of death
Postcode : 2602
Visit time : 19/10/2004 4:02 PM

Remark :

“I used to fear dying. Then I read Ivan Illich’s _Limits to Medicine_, a book giving a history of the effects (and frequent ineffectiveness) of Western medicine. In a chapter on Western attitudes to death through the ages, Illich describes the medieval practice of dancing with Death on graves, which illustrated a very different attitude to it from our own.

But what affected me most was Illich’s description of the origin of the vampire myth in the discovery of bloodied hands on some exhumed corpses. What had occurred on occasion was that someone had been buried while still alive; had resuscitated and tried to scrabble his or her way out of the coffin; and had subsequently expired, leaving behind the bloodened fingertips suggestive of some gruesome after-death predation.

Once I’d read this, I realised that my own fear of death had arisen from some brush with these stories of people buried alive: that in fact my fear of death had been a fear of being buried alive and finding myself doomed to suffocate. With that realisation, my fear of death evaporated.

My fear of dying gruesomely, painfully, is not lessened; and my hunger to enjoy life and live it fully is undiminished; but the process of dying and the state of being dead no longer hold any fear for me in themselves.

As well, the book itself was tremendously informative and a very powerful read!”

Mario’s Response

This is actually quite an interesting remark, where it shows one of the reason why people might be led to neglecting the sustainability issues.

I guess everyone has different perceptions/interpretation of what they read. And as I previously mentioned a couple of times (on the other discussions in the blog), media has good and bad influences to the sustainability problems and most of them are actually indirectly. I took the remark above as an example of a book (as one of the influential media forms) being a bad influence indirectly.

From this example, the guy is brought up with the fear of dying. This fear changed his/her approach his/her life. He/she lives with the hunger to enjoy life fully and based on my perceptions, this will of course lessen his/her attention to the environment’s needs (sustainability).