Now that I’ve cited it half a dozen times, I think I’ve exhausted my use of Wikipedia as a source for this advent calendar. From here on out, I’ll be turning to books. Here are four views on the afterlife from ancient books I have lying around the house and have read.

Whether the ideas in the excerpts are true isn’t interesting. There’s no way for us to know for certain. However, the thread of justice in each one tells us something about human nature. We’ve always wanted fairness. Good for good and bad for bad.

Here are the excerpts:

The Bhagavad Gita

Do not doubt this. Whatever occupies the mind at the time of death determines the destination of the dying; always they will tend toward that state of being.

The Aeneid

They are put to punishment, to pay the penalty for all their ancient sins. Some are stretched and hung out empty to dry in the winds. Some have the strain of evil...

[Click the link above to see the post on Medium. I’m transitioning to Medium.]

Before about 1930, most people in Western countries died in their own homes, surrounded by family, and comforted by clergy, neighbors, and doctors making house calls. By the mid-20th century, half of all Americans died in a hospital. By the start of the 21st century, only about 20 to 25% of people in developed countries died outside of a medical institution. The shift away from dying at home, towards dying in a professionalized medical environment, has been termed the “Invisible Death.”

That block quote is from the Wikipedia article on death, which is well sourced and worth a read. The section I quoted here, on invisible death, especially stood out to me.

A couple of days ago I wrote about how countries across the world once practiced the Festival of the Dead (also known as the Feast of Ancestors). It was a...

One book I’ve been reading in light of this advent calendar is Cicero’s On Living and Dying Well. What an amazing work! In addition to quoting Euripedes’s famous line “our soul is god,” Cicero talks about why death is ultimately a net good for us.

Here are two notable quotes:

“Away with these old wives’ tales, with this idea that it’s terrible to die before one’s time! What time? The time of nature? It made us a loan without a due date … Of every other good we consider it better to have some share than none at all. Why is it different with life?”

“Death is especially likely to be met with equanimity when the person departing from life can find consolation in his own laudable actions. No life is too short if virtue is complete.”

[Click the link above to see the post on Medium]

As I continue to do rudimentary research on Halloween as part of this advent calendar, I’m discovering that I know pretty much nothing about the holiday.

Here are five little facts I’ve picked up:

1. The Festival of the Dead, which generally took place at the end of October and the beginning of November, was celebrated in a wide range of places including ancient Peru, Rome, Egypt, Persia, and Japan.

2. The word “Halloween” is pretty old. It surfaced around 1550, and by 1785 Robert Burns was writing poems about it.

3. The concept of begging for treats is also old. Shakespeare mentions it in Two Gentleman of Verona when a character is said to be “puling like a beggar at Hallowmas.”

4. Dressing up in costumes was called guising, and it was first recorded as happening in Scotland just before 1900, though it may have originated long before as a way to...

[Click the link above to see the post on Medium]

Underneath Paris rests the bones of about six million people. I’ve stood in those catacombs and stared at the seemingly endless stacks of femurs and skulls, and when I did it struck me that history hasn’t cared much for most of us. There have been a handful of heroes entombed in pyramids, abbeys, and cathedrals — and then there’s everyone else beneath the ground (peasants, artisans, farmers, jokers), forgotten within a generation or two.

It reminds me of a quote from Banksy, wherein he channels the words of the neuroscientist David Eagleman.

Banksy says:

They say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing, and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.

When somebody says your name for the last time. For most of the six million people under Paris, that time likely came quickly. There’s no way to...

Yesterday’s post ended with the line, “death cannot conquer a life well lived.” I hadn’t considered the line before writing it, but the more I think about it the more I like it.

It reminds me of when the scientist Brian Greene spoke at Brigham Young University, my alma mater. In the Q&A afterward someone asked him why he felt compelled to work so hard to find the answers of the universe given that he was an atheist and didn’t believe in an afterlife. Greene’s response was that he wanted his ideas to live beyond his life. He said he believed we each have a responsibility to leave our best work behind so it can survive beyond us.

That is a good moral framework to live by. If forces me to ask, If I were to die today, what would I leave behind? What mark have I made for good on the world? The fact that I’m unsatisfied with my answer compels me to try harder to produce quality...

When Sufjan Stevens released his sixth studio album, The Age of Adz (pronounced “odds”), my wife and I went to see him in concert. There were costumes, dancing, and a ten-minute essay from Sufjan about the story behind the album. It was probably the best concert I’ve been to.

I’d heard The Age of Adz several times before the concert, but it was only at the concert that I felt the power of the album’s eponymous song, “Age of Adz.”

You can listen to the song here if you’d like. It’s best LOUD, on a good sound system.

By all measures, the composition is messy and abrasive. The trombones, the flutes, the choir, the electric whirrs and pops, the whiny edge to Sufjan’s voice — it’s perhaps overwhelming. For me, the sounds conjure the wild imagery of Metropolis, the great German film from 1927.

It also conjures imagery from The Divine Comedy, Dante’s 14th century poem.

...

On the first day of the advent I shared two ideas about death that have haunted me since I heard them.

Here’s another one.

This one’s from Harold Bloom, a literary critic from Yale. He says,

What is the essence of religion? Sigmund Freud said it was the longing for the father. Others have called it the desire for the mother or for transcendence. I fear deeply that all these are idealizations, and I offer the rather melancholy suggestion that they would all vanish from us if we did not know that we must die. Religion rises inevitably from our apprehension of our own death.

I don’t if know what Bloom says is true. (Most of the time I think Bloom is just an old troll, saying things to get a rile.) But the idea has haunted me, nevertheless. What is the connection between religion and death? Do religious narratives exist because we fear death? Again, I don’t know.

If nothing else, the...

The Wikipedia page on Halloween is around 7,000 words long and has nearly 200 footnotes. It’s a good place to start if you want to learn how to appreciate this twisted holiday, which is my intent for this advent.

According to Sam Portaro, a reverend who’s quoted in the page’s first paragraph, Halloween has traditionally revolved around the theme of using “humor and ridicule to confront the power of death.”

In other words, Halloween isn’t so different from Christmas and Easter, with their primal concerns about conquering death. Halloween just goes about the whole business with whimsy rather than reverence.

Of course, Portaro says confronting the power of death is what Halloween has traditionally been about. Is that what it’s still about? I never thought I was confronting the power of death as I went door to door, plunking candy into my pillow case. I never thought about death as I...