Dying Stoic – I have been thinking about death a lot recently. Particularly, and perhaps predictably, my death. I hope, more than most things, to be able to approach it stoically. Maybe not as stoically as a tree burning unavoidably and inevitably in a forest fire, but at least something that aspires to that. It is, of course, unlikely that I will live up to that ideal. I will probably go screaming and fuming and pleading and crying into my death, a bastardization of ‘do not go gentle into the good night’ and all that. It makes me think of something Christopher Hitchens said and wrote, that if on his deathbed he had a last minute conversion to some deity or religion in a desperate plea for immortality or an afterlife or even just a few more moments of life, then know in advance that it would not be him making those propitiations but rather some irrational, unconscious husk of him doing it. In his most lucid and conscious moments he rejected any form of faith or subservience, anything that would capitulate to such things would, by definition, not be him. I would like to think the same for me as it relates to my death, that whatever base instinct, whatever biological and genetic dictates control my behaviors and mind in the end, that it is not the true me. Instead the intellectual and rational me, in the here and now, looks upon death stoically, knowing that it is inevitable, that it is unavoidable, that perhaps it is even desirable, and accepts it for what it is, which is nothing more than the natural consequence of life and likely existence itself. Me, in this moment and the moments in which I think of death, are stoic. I feel it is important to say this for what it is worth, which might very well be nothing. And now on to a philosophical observation, I think the mass of men are stoics. Not in how they approach death, but rather how they approach life. Observe how humans look upon their fellow members, watch how they are entirely uncaring to the suffering and pain and inequities and immense injustice that plague mankind, and see their apathy and indifference and smug superiority and in too many cases their proactive actions dedicated to worsening the lives of untold numbers. These are the true stoics, those alive and perpetuating the forest fire of human calamity that is endemic to our global society looking on with an expressionless grimace. With an indictment like that, so much for wanting to be a stoic, or even a human. And yet here I am both human and stoic, thinking that “hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way”, that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”, and “once more unto the breach”, and all that and so on. Stoic to the end. Stoic as Stoke is while watching a forest fire. – Zachary