“…it is he who is dead and not I.”
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy is a powerful exploration of mortality. Through the story of Ivan Ilyich, a successful and respected lawyer, Tolstoy portrays the tragedy of a life lived without acknowledging the certainty of one’s own death. Instead, as articulated in the quote, denial is a staunch ally in the process: others die, not me.
“To be or not to be, that is the question.” The legendary words are rather trite today. Their perceptiveness drained with time and abuse. Nonetheless, pain, suffering, and death do permeate life. At a basic level, it’s all absurd. And suicide is a perfectly rational consideration. Shakespeare understood. In an absurd world, meaning makes life worth living. It answers the
E-H Therapy theory holds that four existential givens (also called paradoxical polarities) pervade The Cosmological Dimension of the Therapeutic Encounter. The third polarity is wishing to be connected but being irrevocably separate.
This problem shows the power of a mental set, an unconscious predisposition to approach a problem in a particular way based on experience and habit. A mental set exemplifies the limitations experience puts on choice. However, the past is simply one of several limitations placed on our freedom.
A picture is worth a thousand words. At Eternity’s Gate by Vincent van Gogh conveys the overwhelming weight of grief. However, the title brings home the meaning of the work and, more surprisingly, the hope in the subject of the painting, death. Western art depicts death through numerous symbols and scenes: skeletons, skulls, scythes, apocalyptic scenes, the superhuman, the demonic,
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