beyond wishful thinking 5and of metaphysics, is to look straight at a sun that Pascal assured us,
with reason, cannot be long observed without danger. It is to live in fear
of the incomprehensible and awful end before us.
However, to contrive to forget that we will die— to turn wholly away
from death or at least as far away from it as we can— is to risk losing the
most powerful antidote to a life of routine, convention, conformity, and
submission— to a somnambulant life, which is to say, to a life that is not
fully possessed and that exhibits only in diminished form the attri-
butes of life: surfeit, spontaneity, and surprise. It is the prospect of
death that gives life its decisive, irreversible shape and makes time, our
time, full of weight and consequence. Aroused by the awareness of death,
so closely connected to the sentiment of life, we can conceive an exis-
tence of striving and resist the automatisms, the habits, the endless lit-
tle surrenders that rob us, by installments, of the substance of life.
As we confront this dilemma, we have reason for hope. If we were
able fully to awaken to life and to grasp its qualities and possibilities,
we might be just as overtaken by a paralyzing sentiment as if we held
death fi rmly in our line of vision. Th at each of us was snatched out of
nothingness before being returned to it (or promoted, according to
some of the historical religions, to the perpetual ordeal of an unevent-
ful timelessness) is an enigma of the same order as the riddle of mortal-
ity. It is also a fortune so great that it may be as hard to consider steadily
as our fall toward death. Life, too, seen for what it is, or can become,
would be a sun blinding us through an exultation that might paradoxi-
cally inhibit our ability to seize its benefi ts.
So we must run back and forth between these two suns in our
fi rmament— the presentiment of death and the awareness of life— and
avoid being transfi xed by either of them. If we are lucky, in this uncer-
tain middle distance, we may form attachments and projects that en-
hance the sentiment of life. However, even as we try our luck, death
comes to us, and brings our experiment to an end.
Groundlessness
We are unable to grasp the ground of being, the ultimate basis for our
existence in the world as well as for the existence of the world. We can-
not look into the beginning and end of time. In our reasoning, one