But, now, as he thought about that meditating young woman, he experienced softer feelings--a flood of compassion for her and for all his fellow humans who are victims of that freakish twist of evolution that grants self-awareness but not the requisite psychological equipment to deal with the pain of transient existence. And so throughout the years, the centuries, the millennia, we have relentlessly constructed makeshift denials of finiteness. Would we, would any of us, ever be done with our search for a higher power with whom we can merge and exist forever, for God-given instruction manuals, for some sign of a larger established design, for ritual and ceremony?
"To change 'it was' into 'thus I willed it'--that alone shall I call redemption."
One night, unable to sleep and craving some comfort, he restlessly browsed in his library. He could find nothing written in his own field that seemed even remotely relevant to his life situation, nothing pertaining to how should one live, or find meaning in one's remaining days. But then his eye fell upon a dog-eared copy of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra.
"To change 'it was' into 'thus I willed it'--that alone shall I call redemption." Julius understood Nietzsche's words to mean that he had to choose his life--he had to live it rather than be lived by it. In other words he should love his destiny.
Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don't leave any unlived life behind.
After a few minutes Julius "came to": he knew exactly what to do and how to spend his final year. He would live just the way he had lived the previous year--and the year before that and before that. He loved being a therapist; he loved connecting to others and helping to bring something to life in them. Maybe his work was sublimation for his lost connection to his wife; maybe he needed the applause, the affirmation and gratitude of those he helped. Even so, even if dark motives played their role, he was grateful for his work. God bless it!
"If that is what I want--to read and to get a good night's sleep--Dr. Hertzfeld, tell me--why can't I, why don't I, do it?"
why can't I do what I truly want to do?
Ecstasyin the act of copulation. That is it! That is the true essence and core of all things, the goal and purpose of all existence.
Lifeis a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
Where had Philip's face, name, story been lurking all these years? Hard to get his mind around the fact that the memory of his whole experience with Philip was contained neurochemically somewhere in the cortex of his brain. Most likely Philip dwelled in an intricate "Philip" network of connected neurons that, when triggered by the right neurotransmitters, would spring into action and project an image of Philip upon a ghostly screen in his visual cortex. He found it chilling to think of harboring a microscopic robotic projectionist in his brain.
Talentis like a marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like a marksman who hits a target which others cannot see.
Ahappy life is impossible; the best that a man can attain is a heroic life.
But today nothing seemed important. He suspected that nothing had ever been important, that his mind had arbitrarily imbued projects with importance and then cunningly covered its traces. Today he saw through the ruse of a lifetime. Today there was nothing important to do, and he ambled aimlessly down Union Street.
Two pert counter clerks flirted with some of the male customers. These were the girls that had never looked his way, never flirted with him when he was young nor caught his gaze as he aged. Time to realize that his time would never come, that those nubile, breasty girls with the Snow White faces would never turn his way with a coy smile and say, "Hey, haven't seen you here for a while. How's it going?" It was not going to happen. Life was seriously linear and not reversible.
"He does not have it to give"--how many times have I said that to how many patients--about husbands or wives or fathers.
Thesolid foundations of our view of the world and thus its depth or shallowness are formed in the years of childhood. Such a view is subsequently elaborated and perfected, yet essentially it is not altered.
Kant was a creature of habit and not inclined to receive unknown visitors. Last week I described to you the regularity of his schedule--so exact that the townspeople could set their watches by seeing him on his daily walk.
How quickly one moves back into the familiar force field of another person! So much like the state-dependent memories in dreams in which the landscape's eerie familiarity reminds you that you've visited the identical locale before in other dreams. Same with marijuana--a couple of hits and suddenly you're in a familiar place thinking familiar thoughts that exist only in the marijuana state. And it's the same with Philip. Only a little time in his presence and--presto--my deep memories of him plus a peculiar Philip-induced state of mind reappear in a flash.
The idea of rejoining the universal oneness without any persistence of me and my memories and unique consciousness is the coldest of comfort. No, it's no comfort at all.
Religionhas everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence...and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.
Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners condemned not to death but to life and as yet all too unconscious of what their sentence means. Nevertheless every man desires to reach old age...a state of life of which it may be said "it is bad today, and every day it will get worse, until the worst of all happens
And young Arthur? Arthur Schopenhauer was to grow up into one of the wisest men who ever lived. And one of the most despairing and life-hating of men, a man who at the age of fifty-five would write: Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners condemned not to death but to life and as yet all too unconscious of what their sentence means. Nevertheless every man desires to reach old age...a state of life of which it may be said "it is bad today, and every day it will get worse, until the worst of all happens."
Inendless space countless luminous spheres, round each of which some dozen smaller illuminated ones revolve, hot at the core and covered with a cold hard crust on which a mouldy film has produced living and knowing beings--this is...the real, the world.
"I'm not your supervisor, Philip, that's still to be determined, but I'll give you psychotherapy lesson number one, gratis. It's not ideas, nor vision, nor tools that truly matter in therapy. If you debrief patients at the end of therapy about the process, what do they remember? Never the ideas--it's always the relationship.
First, I want to caution you against the error of assuming that your view of reality is the real thing--the res naturalis --and that your mission is to impose this vision on others. You crave and value relationships, and you make the erroneous assumption that I, indeed everyone, must do the same and that if I claim otherwise, I've repressed my relationship-craving.
A little friendliness and warmth, Schopenhauer said, makes it possible to manipulate people just as we need to warm wax if we wish to work it."
As for my goal in the therapy group, I can be real clear about that: it is to help each member understand as much as possible about how he or she relates to each person in the group, including the therapist.
-I make the assumption that group members will manifest the same behavior in the group that has created difficulties for them in their social life.
I maintain a here-and-now focus--that's an essential concept for you to master as a therapist, Philip. In other words, the group works ahistorically: we focus on the now --there's no need to investigate each member's past history in depth--we focus on the current moment in the group; and on the here --forget about what members say has gone wrong in other relationships--I make the assumption that group members will manifest the same behavior in the group that has created difficulties for them in their social life. And I further assume that ultimately they will generalize what they learn about their group relationships to their relationships outside.
"Death is always there, the horizon of all these concerns. Socrates said it most clearly, 'to learn to live well, one must first learn to die well.' Or Seneca, 'No man enjoys the true taste of life but he who is willing and ready to quit it.'"
Justbecause the terrible activity of the genital system still slumbers, while that of the brain already has its full briskness, childhood is the time of innocence and happiness, the paradise of life, the lost Eden, on which we look back longingly through the whole remaining course of our life.
Thegreatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life because that is the only reality, all else being the play of thought. But we could just as well call it our greatest folly because that which exists only a moment and vanishes as a dream can never be worth a serious effort.
Many of his improved patients had a hell of a time when visiting their parents: they had to guard against being sucked back into their old family role and had to expend considerable energy persuading parents and siblings that they were indeed changed.
"Nietzsche once wrote that a major difference between man and the cow was that the cow knew how to exist, how to live without angst--that is, fear --in the blessed now, unburdened by the past and unaware of the terrors of the future. But we unfortunate humans are so haunted by the past and future that we can only saunter briefly in the now. Do you know why we so yearn for the golden days of childhood? Nietzsche tells us it's because those childhood days were the carefree days, days free of care, days before we were weighted down by leaden, painful memories, by the debris of the past. Allow me to make one marginal note: I refer to a Nietzsche essay, but this thought was not original--in this, as in so much else, he looted the works of Schopenhauer."
Kierkegaard described some individuals as being in 'double despair,' that is, they are in despair but too self-deceived to know even that they are in despair. I think you may be in double despair. Here's what I mean: most of my own suffering is a result of my being driven by desires, and then, once I satisfy a desire, I enjoy a moment of satiation, which soon is transformed into boredom, which is then interrupted by another desire springing up. Schopenhauer felt this was the universal human condition--wanting, momentary satiation, boredom, further wanting.
Ultimately, he was to master a dozen modern and ancient languages, and it was his habit, as visitors to his memorial library have noted, to write his marginal notes in the language of each text.
When, at the end of their lives, most men look back they will find that they have lived throughout ad interim. They will be surprised to see that the very thing they allowed to slip by unappreciated and unenjoyed was just their life. And so a man, having been duped by hope, dances into the arms of death.
The trouble with a kitten is that Eventually it becomes a cat. The trouble with a kitten is that Eventually it becomes a cat.
Of course, now he realized that the reverse was true--that the couplet had it right--that the golden age came first, that his innocent, kittenly beginnings, the playfulness, the hide-and-seek, the capture-the-flag games, and the building of forts out of the empty liquor boxes in his father's store, while unburdened by guilt, guile, knowledge, or duty, was the very best time of life and that as the days and years passed, the intensity of his flame dimmed, and existence grew inexorably more grim. The very worst was saved for last.
It was true he had never truly savored the moment, never grasped the present, never said to himself, "This is it, this time, this day--this is what I want! These are the good old days, right now. Let me remain in this moment, let me take root in this place for all time." No, he had always believed that the juiciest meat of life was yet to be found and had always coveted the future--the time of being older, smarter, bigger, richer. And then came the upheaval, the time of the great reversal, the sudden and cataclysmic deidealization of the future, and the beginning of the aching yearning for what used to be.
One of the major side benefits of leading a group--a fact never stated in the professional literature--is that a potent therapy group often heals the therapist as well as the patients.
disturbing quotidian events become less unsettling if they are viewed from the aspect of eternity.
Your anxiety feels just as awful as anxiety in others that comes from more obviously calamitous sources."
"Remember my version of Boyle's law," said Julius. "A small amount of anxiety will expand to fill our whole anxiety cavity. Your anxiety feels just as awful as anxiety in others that comes from more obviously calamitous sources."
clumsy and Rebecca--and also Pam--being beautiful and...
Aperson of high, rare mental gifts who is forced into a job which is merely useful is like a valuable vase decorated with the most beautiful painting and then used as a kitchen pot.
Itis noteworthy and remarkable to see how man, besides his life in the concrete, always lives a second life in the abstract...(where) in the sphere of calm deliberation, what previously possessed him completely and moved him intensely appears to him cold, colorless, and distant: he is a mere spectator and observer.
Yesterday and tomorrow do not exist. Past remembrances, future longings, only produce disquiet. The path to equanimity lies in observing the present and allowing it to float undisturbed down the river of our awareness."
Greatsufferings render lesser ones quite incapable of being felt, and conversely, in the absence of great sufferings even the smallest vexations and annoyances torment us.
when we awake discouraged in the middle of the night, enemies that we had defeated long ago come back to haunt us."
will-o'-the-wisp.
Nietzsche's phrase from Zarathustra : "One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star."
Everywhere she looked, there was renunciation, sacrifice, limitation, and resignation. Whatever happened to life? To joy, expansion, passion, carpe diem? Was life so anguished that it should be sacrificed for the sake of equanimity? Perhaps the four noble truths were culture-bound. Perhaps they were truths for 2,500 years ago in a land with overwhelming poverty, overcrowding, starvation, disease, class oppression, and lack of any hope for a better future. But were they truths for her now? Didn't Marx have it right? Didn't all religions based on release or a better life hereafter target the poor, the suffering, the enslaved?
She saw Earl for what he was--an aging child, his large lips pursed and lunging for any nipple within range. And John--poor, effete, pusillanimous John, still unwilling to grasp that there can be no yes without a no. And Vijay, too, who chose to sacrifice life, novelty, adventure, friendship upon the altar of the great God, Equanimity. Use the right word for the whole bunch, Pam thought. Cowards. Moral cowards. None of them deserved her. Flush them away.
Theflower replied: You fool! Do you imagine I blossom in order to be seen? I blossom for my own sake because it pleases me, and not for the sake of others. My joy consists in my being and my blossoming.
the more one has in oneself, the less one will want from others.
he had translated one of his patient's central issues into the here-and-now, where it could be explored firsthand. It was always more productive to focus on the here-and-now than to work on the patient's
He had done what the good group therapist should do: he had translated one of his patient's central issues into the here-and-now, where it could be explored firsthand. It was always more productive to focus on the here-and-now than to work on the patient's reconstructions of an event from the past or from current outside life.
In his view the work in therapy consisted of two phases: first interaction, often emotional, and second, understanding that interaction. That's the way therapy should proceed--an alternating sequence of evocation of emotions and then understanding.
"Before beginning the group I read Julius's book on group therapy and was well prepared for the events of these meetings. I expected certain things to happen: that I would be an object of curiosity, that some would welcome me and some not, that the established hierarchy of power would be unsettled by my entrance, that the women might look favorably upon me and the men unfavorably, that the more central members might resent my appearance while the less influential ones might be protective of me. Anticipating these things has resulted in my viewing the events in the group dispassionately."
"Years ago there was a therapist named Fritz Perls who started a school called gestalt therapy. You don't hear much about him nowadays, but, anyway, he did a lot of focusing on the body--you know, 'Look what your left hand is doing right now,' or 'I see you stroking your beard a lot.' He'd ask patients to exaggerate the movement: 'Keep making a tighter fist with your left hand,' or 'Keep stroking that beard more and more vigorously and stay aware of what gets evoked.' "I always felt there was a lot to Perls's approach because so much of our unconscious is expressed through body movements that lie out of our own awareness.
"Love is in the one who loves not in the one who is loved
I firmly believe that the happiest of men are those who seek for nothing so much as solitude. I speak of the divine Schopenhauer, of Nietzsche and Kant. Their point, and my point, is that the man of inner wealth wants nothing from the outside except the negative gift of undisturbed leisure which permits him to enjoy his wealth--that is, his intellectual faculties.
Rebecca was the first to respond, "To be so content, to need so little from others, never to crave the company of others--sounds pretty lonely, Philip." "On the contrary," said Philip, "in the past, when I craved the company of others, asked for something which they would not, indeed could not, give-- that was when I knew loneliness. I knew it very well. To need no person is never to be lonely. Blessed isolation is what I seek."
"I try always to keep in mind that we are all sentenced to an existence filled with inescapable misery--an existence which none of us would choose if we knew the facts ahead of time. In that sense we are all, as Schopenhauer put it, fellow sufferers, and we stand in need of tolerance and love from our neighbors in life."
Thecheerfulness and buoyancy of our youth are due partly to the fact that we are climbing the hill of life and do not see death that lies at the foot of the other side.
Early in their training therapists are taught to focus upon patients' responsibility for their life dilemmas. Mature therapists never accept at face value their patients' accounts of mistreatment by others. Instead, therapists understand that to some extent individuals are cocreators of their social environment and that relationships are always reciprocal.
Heis a happy man who can once and for all avoid having to do with a great many of his fellow creatures.
Sexdoes not hesitate to intrude with its trash, and to interfere with the negotiations of statesmen and the investigations of the learned. Every day it destroys the most valuable relationships. Indeed it robs of all conscience those who were previously honorable and upright.
His many rejections ultimately caused him to link sexual desire with humiliation.
The saddest of love stories in the Schopenhauer chronicles took place when he was forty-three and attempted to court Flora Weiss, a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl. One evening at a boating party he approached Flora with a bunch of grapes and informed her of his attraction to her and his intention of speaking to her parents about marriage. Later, Flora's father was taken aback by Schopenhauer's proposal and responded, "But she is a mere child." Ultimately, he agreed to leave the decision to Flora. The business came to an end when Flora made it clear to all concerned that she vehemently disliked Schopenhauer.
Next to the love of life it [sex] shows itself here as the strongest and most active of all motives, and incessantly lays claim to half the powers and thoughts of the younger portion of mankind. It is the ultimate goal of almost all human effort. It has an unfavorable influence on the most important affairs, interrupts every hour the most serious occupations, and sometimes perplexes for a while the greatest human minds.... Sex is really the invisible point of all action and conduct, and peeps up everywhere in spite of all the veils thrown over it. It is the cause of war and the aim and object of peace,...the inexhaustible source of wit, the key to all allusions, and the meaning of all mysterious hints, of all unspoken offers and all stolen glances; it is the meditation of the young and often the old as well, the hourly thought of the unchaste and, even against their will, the constantly recurring imagination of the chaste.
"The true end of the whole love story, though the parties concerned are unaware of it, is that a particular child may be begotten," he continues. "Therefore what here guides man is really an instinct directed to what is best in the species, whereas man himself imagines he is seeking merely a heightening of his own pleasure."
Repeatedly, he emphasizes that the force of sex is irresistible. "For he is under the influence of an impulse akin to the instinct of insects, which compels him to pursue his purposes unconditionally, in spite of all the arguments of his faculty of reason.... He cannot give it up." And reason has little to do with it.
"What is not endowed with reason cannot possibly be ruled with reason."
we are governed by deep biological forces and then delude ourselves into thinking that we consciously choose our activities.
alternatives exclude, that for every yes there has to be a no."
Heidegger spoke of confronting the limiting of possibility. In fact he linked it to the fear of death. Death, he suggested, was the impossibility of further possibility.
Remember if you ever happen to turn your attentions to externals, for the pleasure of anyone, be assured that you have ruined your scheme of life.
Julius always taught students the difference between vertical and horizontal self-disclosure. The group was pressing, as expected, for vertical disclosure--details about the past, including such queries as the scope and duration of his drinking--whereas horizontal disclosure, that is, disclosure about the disclosure, was always far more productive.
Weshould set a limit to our wishes, curb our desires, and subdue our anger, always mindful of the fact that the individual can attain only an infinitely small share of the things that are worth having...
She couldn't rouse much enthusiasm for a man who would need an all-day equanimity retreat to recover from the stress of ordering breakfast.
Norose without a thorn. But many a thorn without a rose.
Schopenhauer's major work, The World as Will and Representation, written during his twenties, was published in 1818, and a second supplementary volume in 1844. It is a work of astonishing breadth and depth, offering penetrating observations about logic, ethics, epistemology, perception, science, mathematics, beauty, art, poetry, music, the need for metaphysics, and man's relationship to others and to himself.
We want, we want, we want, we want. There are ten needs waiting in the wings of the unconscious for every one that reaches awareness. The will drives us relentlessly because, once a need is satisfied, it is soon replaced by another need and another and another throughout our life.
Tantalus, who dared to defy Zeus, was punished for his hubris by being eternally tempted but never satisfied. Human life, Schopenhauer thought, eternally revolves around an axle of need followed by satiation. Are we contented by the satiation? Alas, only briefly. Almost immediately boredom sets in, and once again we are propelled into motion, this time to escape from the terrors of boredom.
And what is the most terrible thing about boredom? Why do we rush to dispel it? Because it is a distraction-free state which soon enough reveals underlying unpalatable truths about existence--our insignificance, our meaningless existence, our inexorable progression to deterioration and death.
Arthur often reminded us (and himself) that emotion has the power to obscure and falsify knowledge: that the whole world assumes a smiling aspect when we have reason to rejoice, and a dark and gloomy one when sorrow weighs upon us.
Ihave not written for the crowd.... I hand down my work to the thinking individuals who in the course of time will appear as rare exceptions. They will feel as I felt, or as a shipwrecked sailor feels on a desert island for whom the trace of a former fellow sufferer affords more consolation than do all the cockatoos and apes in the trees.
"Isn't it so," said Philip, "that people fear contact with the afflicted because they wish not to be confronted with the death that awaits each of them?"
"'A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing after thousands and thousands of years of nonexistence; he lives for a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more.'
Lifecan be compared to a piece of embroidered material of which, everyone in the first half of his time, comes to see the top side, but in the second half, the reverse side. The latter is not so beautiful, but is more instructive because it enables one to see how the threads are connected together.
his mind, walked back into the group room, took out his pipe, and enjoyed the aroma of rich Turkish
For some time, he regularly placed a gold piece on the table when he sat down and removed it when he left. One of the military officers that usually lunched at the same table once asked him about the purpose of this exercise. Schopenhauer replied that he would donate the gold piece for the poor the day that he heard officers have a serious conversation that did not entirely revolve around their horses, dogs, or women. During his meal he would address his poodle, Atman, as "You, Sir," and if Atman misbehaved he redressed him by calling him "You Human!"
"I have no intention to get married because it would only cause me worries." "And why would that would be the case?" "I would be jealous, because my wife would cheat on me." "Why are you so sure of that?" "Because I would deserve it." "Why is that?" "Because I would have married."
Themonuments, the ideas left behind by beings like me are my greatest pleasure in life. Without books I would long ago have been in despair.
First step is to go from the concrete--that is, the ship, the shells, the sheep, and so on--to the abstract. In other words, ask yourself: what does this ship or voyage or harbor represent?"
"I believe the parable warns us against attachment and urges us to stay attuned to the miracle of being--not to worry about how things are but to be in a state of wonderment that things are --that things exist at all."
"One of Schopenhauer's formulations that helped me," said Philip, "was the idea that relative happiness stems from three sources: what one is, what one has, and what one represents in the eyes of others. He urges that we focus only on the first and do not bank on the second and third--on having and our reputation -- because we have no control over those two; they can, and will, be taken away from us--just as your inevitable aging is taking away your beauty. In fact, 'having' has a reverse factor, he said-- what we have often starts to have us.
He compared sexual passion to the daylight which obscures the stars.
A visible end to therapy always has that result; for that reason pioneer practitioners like Otto Rank and Carl Rogers often set a termination date at the very onset of therapy.
"The only way you can save your marriage is to be willing (and able) to leave it."
Sometimes when thinking about Pam and Philip, he was visited by the Talmudic phrase "to redeem one person is to save the whole world."
Schopenhauer two centuries ago understood the underlying reality: the sheer awesome power of the sex drive. It's the most fundamental force within us--the will to live, to reproduce--and it can't be stilled.
One must recognize the life force that exists in all of nature, that manifest itself through each person's individual existence, and that will ultimately reclaim that force when the individual no longer exists as a physical entity.
Loneliness was the demon that most plagued Schopenhauer, and he grew adept at constructing defenses against it. Of these, the most valuable was the conviction that he was master of his destiny--that he chose loneliness; loneliness did not choose him.
Far better to realize the truth: that pain and suffering are inevitable, inescapable, and essential to life
He urged us to live and experience life now rather than live for the "hope" of some future good. Two generations later Nietzsche would take up this call. He considered hope our greatest scourge and pilloried Plato, Socrates, and Christianity for focusing our attention away from the only life that we have and toward some future illusory world.
Whereare there any real monogamists? We all live for a time and, most of us, always, in polygamy. And since every man needs many women, there is nothing fairer than to make it incumbent upon him to provide for many women. This will reduce woman to her true and natural position as a subordinate being.
Everyonewh o is in love will experience an extraordin ary disillusio nment after the pleasure is finally attained; and he will be astonished that what was desired with such longing achieves nothing more than what every other sexual satisfacti on achieves, so that he does not see himself very much benefited by it.
Weshould treat with indulgence every human folly, failing, and vice, bearing in mind that what we have before us are simply our own failings, follies, and vices.
Philip turned to Julius, "when your comment about my epitaph came to mind. And that was when I realized that Schopenhauer was right: life is forever a torment, and desire is unquenchable. The wheel of torment would spin forever; I had to find a way to get off the wheel, and it was then I deliberately set about patterning my life after his."
Somecannot loosen their own chains yet can nonetheles s liberate their friends. -- Nietzsch e
Schopenhauer always viewed happiness as a negative state--an absence of suffering-- and treasured Aristotle's maxim "Not to pleasure but to painlessness do the prudent aspire.")
Atthe end of his life, no man, if he be sincere and in possession of his faculties, would ever wish to go though it again. Rather than this, he will much prefer to choose complete nonexisten ce.
Ican bear the thought that in a short time worms will eat away my body but the idea of philosophy professors nibbling at my philosophy makes me shudder.
How did he depict death? Metaphors of death— confrontation abound in his work; we are sheep cavorting in the pasture, and death is a butcher who capriciously selects one of us and then another for slaughter. Or we are like young children in a theater eager for the show to begin and, fortunately, do not know what is going to happen to us. Or we are sailors, energetically navigating our ships to avoid rocks and whirlpools, all the while heading unerringly to the great final catastrophic shipwreck.
The path from birth to death is always downhill as regards well-being and the enjoyment of life; blissfully dreaming childhood, lighthearted youth, toilsome manhood, frail and often pitiable old age, the torture of the last illness, and finally the agony of death.
Death, he says, should be considered a blessing, a release from the inexorable anguish of biped existence. "We should welcome it as a desirable and happy event instead of, as is usually the case, with fear and trembling."
Life should be reviled for interrupting our blissful nonexistence, and, in this context, he makes his controversial claim: "If we knocked on the graves and asked the dead if they would like to rise again, they would shake their heads." He cites similar utterances by Plato, Socrates, and Voltaire.