I decided to start writing in English here to boost my knowledge in this beautiful language. As I am reading a study book by Irvin Yalom «Existential psychotherapy» I decided to collect the best things while reading. Hopefully I won’t retype all his book cause practically every word there is worth to mention.
For starters my story behind the scene). During my whole life I had a strange attachment to everything connected to death or the-end-of-life things. I do not know why. This is something inside of me that hungers that close connection. I was seeking for the answers: meaning of life and why we are here. And plenty of others)
That’s how I found Yalom’s books which helped me a lot.
Especially after one big incident in my life when I thought I could die.
Eventually we all die, but I did not want to die that soon. I started feeling too much anxiety, and his books saved me.
In this book he talks about four givens of the human life: death, meaninglessness, freedom, isolation (loneliness), responsibility.
First I read this book in Russian. Now I am re-reading it both in Russian and English. To understand it more profoundly.
I am writing down the citations and there is one which became very popular among the therapists and coaches.
I wanna enshrine it here.
Although the physicality of death destroys man, the idea of death saves him.
Irvin Yalom gave the explanations. They are too massive to copy them here.
So I will use a few of them I wanna to reflect on.
Life without death loses something in its intensity. Life shrinks when death is denied.
Death is the condition that makes it possible for us to live life in an authentic fashion.
Also I do admire this little passage.
... in the French playwright Jean Giraudoux’s Amphitryon 38, there is a conversation between the immortal gods. Jupiter tells Mercury what it is like to don earthly guise to make love to a mortal woman: She will use little expressions and that widens the abyss between us.… She will say, “When I was a child”—or “When I am old”—or “Never in all my life”—This stabs me, Mercury.… We miss something, Mercury—the poignance of the transient—the intimation of mortality—that sweet sadness of grasping at something you cannot hold?”
Isn’t it inherently gorgeous?
Stay tuned!