Montaigne
To philosophise is to learn to die
After he was thrown from the horse
Essays I.20; II.6, Of practice
He tells you to think about death daily, which sounds morbid. Then he reports having very nearly done it.
What actually happened?
One essay is titled That to philosophise is to learn to die, and its method runs against instinct: do not look away, think about it daily, until it stops being strange. This is not theory. In his thirties a rider knocked him off his horse from behind; he was unconscious a long time and the people around him thought he was dead. Coming back, he wrote the whole passage down. It had been light, like falling asleep, nothing like the horror he had spent decades imagining.
Mostly you fear the imagining, not the thing
He came close enough to find the moment itself quiet. Decades of dread had been aimed at a version his own head had built. The experience cannot be lent to anyone, but the sorting can: separate fear of the event from fear of your picture of it.
The dread that arrives at two in the morning is usually a film, not the event.
Avoided it stays terrible, looked at it flattens
His method is to make death ordinary: mention it, think of it, keep it as an acquaintance. Only the unfamiliar is frightening; once familiar it is merely a fact. Refuse to look and the fear stays permanently new, which is exactly what keeps it strong.
Say the thing you fear out loud, write it down, and look at it once a day.
Learning to die is learning to weigh
He says whoever has taught people to die has taught them to live. Once the heaviest item has genuinely been handled, the arguments and the wounded pride of an ordinary week change weight. This is not detachment, it is pricing: using the heaviest thing to value the rest.
Weigh the thing keeping you awake against I am going to die anyway, and see what is left of it.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: you lie awake thinking about dying and have never said so to anyone.
Ask first: is it the event I fear, or my version of it? Have I ever thought it through in daylight, from beginning to end?
Where it goes wrong: reading it as think it through and the fear goes — he was still afraid in old age, only no longer run by it; and the daily thinking is for familiarity, not for sinking into it.
Lines to keep
The thing I fear most is fear.
He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to serve.
Let us deprive death of its strangeness. Let us frequent it.
Same situation, other people are asking
There's less time left and I haven't done anything.Am I afraid of the thing, or of my version of it?I lie awake thinking about dying and say nothing in daylight.I've started being afraid of dying · all 3 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.