The way to dusty death | 1 February 2018
From our UK edition
In the words of Dad’s Army’s Private Frazer: ‘We’re all doomed.’ Life remains a dangerous business whose outcome is always fatal. Despite all kinds of medical progress, the death rate is stubbornly fixed at 100 per cent, while the ways in which we die remain unchanged. At the same time, in a magnificent demonstration of cognitive dissonance, abetted by medical science, the human animal continues to cherish the fantasies of immortality that enable us, in Churchill’s stoic formula, to ‘keep buggering on’. This thrilling tension between the forces of life and death has always inspired two basic attitudes to mortality. First, a realistic, even forensic, fascination with the sensations and protocols of that last exit.
