Memento Mori

In case I haven't mentioned it before, my way of knowing if I really liked a book is whether I want to grab strangers on the street and tell them to read it; such is The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. He received a Pulitzer Prize for this book two months after he died at age 49 of cancer. Before writing his book, he was teaching in British Columbia, a pariah in the world of psychology as he challenged the basic premises of Freud's tenets. Becker in the book not only shows the human motivation not to be Oedipal or other sexual causes, but an existential bedrock question of how to reconcile the body and soul/self, the knowledge of our own inevitable death and what it means to be alive.

This book builds tightly from this seminal issue and encompasses so many aspects of not only psychology but also philosophy, ultimately concluding that to be human means to need to recognize the need for a web of support and an inevitability of surrendering to something beyond experience, faith more than belief and an acknowledgment of creation's unknown plan and its creator.

I can't select a couple of passages to quote because, after reading two pages, returning the book to the library and buying my own copy, I underlined probably 30% of it. Which brings me to another truism of my view of literature, if not life: the "story" rings truest when it is the one we are itching to hear. I can't randomly grab strangers to foist this treatise on them; in fact, I treasure its message so that I would even need to selectively recruit friends. It is not a young person's read, although those interest in psychology studies need it to round out and put into perspective pop culture analysis. It might resonate with both my post-cancer buddies or my friends having a crisis of faith or lapse from the church.

I did mark one page as the one to refer to first, 199 in my copy, on the defeat of despair: "... all social life is the obsessive ritualization of control ... it automatically engineers safety and banishes despair by keeping people focused ... the defeat of despair is not mainly an intellectual problem ... but of self-stimulation via movement. Beyond a given point man is not helped by more "knowing," but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it." To me this means not "I think, therefore I am," but "I act, therefore I am."

Going back to how exiled Becker must have been, and maybe still is, from Freudian interpretations of man's existence, it is impossible to find his second book, Escape for Evil in the local library system. Sounds like a use for some of my remaining credits at Borders. This book qualifies to join my coffee table top favorites, another book that changed my life and bears periodic rereading.