“All the arts which belong to polished life have some common tie, and are connected as it were by some relationship.”
- Cicero
The 20th-century English poet Philip Larkin wrote about mortality with terrible eloquence. His last great poem, 1977’s Aubade, dismisses with contempt the “specious stuff” that claims:
No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel.
Larkin knew that nothingness is precisely what we fear:
No sight, no sound,
No t...
