Thursday, December 11, 2008

Thanatos

The human body is made up of worms and is consumed by worms. This vivid image is used by a rather pessimistic thinker to accentuate the gloomy end of the vessel that carries us through the ocean of life. That there is a certain force within us which is dark and powerful in its darkness and can often engulf is made apparent by the irrational urge to destroy life expressed in terrorist violence, riots or a child breaking his toy in rage. We all know we have to die, and rehearse the final inertness of our bodies through our nightly deaths in sleep. Yet our nightly death indeed gives us many lives through dreams- those myths we enact in the cloak of the night.

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