"When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight," Dr. Johnson opined, "it concentrates his mind wonderfully." True enough. But there certainly are other, less extreme measures, to achieve the same thing. I like to remind myself, from time to time, usually when I’m feeling put upon, overburdened, chained to an uninteresting routine, that nothing one had to do or happened to be doing would seem that way if I knew for sure that I would never have the opportunity to do it again, or anything else. And not just that. I would never remember doing anything, never remember having been. "Not to be here,/Not to be anywhere," as Philip Larkin put it.
Concern over death is a common characteristic of religion — even one like Buddhism, which seems to put God in Husserlian brackets — but in a somewhat paradoxical way. Religion is about finding a point in being and how to go about making it. That cannot be done without taking into consideration overwhelming evidence that your organism will die. The value of religion does not consist in a resolution of this problem, but in the continual reminder of it. Faith is an engagement with death.
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