You can't take it with you
But you can leave something behind. I’ve reached Montaigne’s nineteenth essay[ 1 ], That to philosophise is to learn to die . He seems to have been a little obsessed with death so that the essay is like his own version of the Consolation of Philosophy . I remember when I was a child that I thought I’d live forever. I knew even then that I wouldn’t, but death was such a remote idea, even after my grandma died, that immortality didn’t seem so unlikely. When I was a little older, I can recalling believing that there was nothing after death, which seemed more comforting than a belief in an afterlife which might be rather unpleasant. Perhaps it was the nascent atheist in me that was thinking such a thing. It hasn’t been until fairly recent years that I’ve been thinking about death again. It comes as a bother that I’ve found myself approaching middle age without feeling that I’ve achieved anything in life. The closest I come to such an achievement is my PhD thesis which will continue to gath...