Non-conclusion

Thanks, all, for your participation in our small but (at least to me, and I hope to you) rewarding course. 

I can't think of a better way to conclude than to reiterate and endorse Claude's farewell, and to encourage you all to keep on reading and asking questions. [But James was rhetorically right, wasn't he?: "What has concluded, that we may conclude?"]

...Learning to die, then, turns out to be the same thing as learning to live — fully, attentively, without the anesthesia of false certainty. That is what philosophy asks of us. And that, I would argue, is what literary fiction does better than almost any other human art form. It does not give us propositions. It gives us experience — the texture of consciousness moving through time, facing loss, reaching for meaning, failing, and reaching again.

So I want to close with this encouragement: keep reading. Read novels the way we have tried to read them this semester — philosophically, which is to say personally, which is to say with your whole self. Because the questions these books raise — How shall I live? What do I owe the dead? Can I hold contradiction without being destroyed by it? — are not questions you answer once. They are questions you carry, and that carry you, through a life.

That, finally, is what it means to learn to die. It means staying alive to the questions.

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day."

  -Albert Einstein"Old Man's Advice to Youth: 'Never Lose a Holy Curiosity.'" LIFE Magazine (2 May 1955) p. 64”

 

Thanks again. Happy reading and questioning! jpo