On death and Ernest Becker - J.M. Cameron in NY Books, half a century ago:

‘For some years now people have been saying that death is to us what sex was to the Victorians, suppressed as a topic in ordinary society, repressed as a future certainty by most people most of the time, something children should be shielded from, for they are not to be admitted to the bedside of the dying or allowed to see dead human bodies and they are told stories about death analogous to the stories that used to be told, perhaps still are told in prim circles, about gestation and birth. Death is now prettified out of existence by the relentless and mendacious undertaking industry, with its euphemisms (“casket,” “passed away,” “loved one”) and its painting and mummification of the corrupting body so that it may appear to be something else. After all, sexual repression hasn’t been abolished by frankness in talk, and it may be that the repression of the thought of death is not altogether separable from sexual repression. The interest we have in necrophilia, and the repugnance we at the same time have for it, are both evident. Stories about the English necrophile Christie, who strangled women in order to copulate with them, are eagerly read. So far as I know such acts have not yet been performed on the screen or mimicked in the theater, but my information may well not be up-to-date.’

(…)

‘Finally, the phenomenon of death has in our time become bizarre. Auschwitz and Treblinka, Kolyma and Vorkuta, Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, these are names that represent terrible, uncanny realities that are nevertheless unbelievable and inconceivable. They raise perplexing questions about the nature of our time, questions that are at the same time about death and its meaning—or its absurdity—for us.’

(…)

‘About the deaths of others we sometimes seem to feel differently, especially about such deaths as are attended with great suffering, and we may even say (or, if we no longer say it, we see its point): Those whom the gods love die young.’

(…)

‘Life, for Becker, is a desperate business, in which a steady heroism before the terrors of existence is in general the only thing to be commended. The side of Freud he admires most is his grim honesty. He reminds us that Freud said that “he cured the miseries of the neurotic only to open up to him the normal misery of life.”’

(…)

‘Becker doesn’t think there are any tricks, certainly there is no assured therapy, to make the terror of existence go away. The kind of person we call “balanced” or “well-adjusted” has, it is true, at least for a time, so organized his repressions and balanced the resulting neuroses that he may seem a living refutation of the universality of existential terror. But the beguiling surface conceals horrors: vampirism (living off the substance of others); psychosomatic illnesses; bad dreams; jealousies; aggression. But isn’t there, if not a way of overcoming the fundamental situation of man, at least a position to be adopted, a disposition to be cultivated, an attitude that rests upon truth? Becker’s answer is not to me perfectly clear. He seems to want to say two things. First, heroism is to be commended; the world is, in William James’s phrase, “a theater for heroism.” Not to be a hero (compare Péguy’s “not to be a saint”) is the saddest failure. Freud is a fine example of the heroic; bereaved, in exile, betrayed (as he thought) by so many, a cancerous jaw, yet working, working up to the end. Then, he finds certain possibilities roughed out by religion.
There is a driving force behind a mystery that we cannot understand, and it includes more than reason alone. The urge to cosmic heroism…is sacred and mysterious and not to be neatly ordered and rationalized by science and secularism.
A wonderful, rich, ramshackle book. I’m not sure in what way it is appropriate—if it is—that the author died shortly after his book was published. But for those who would wish to go on with the conversation it is a severe loss.’

(…)

‘It is true that the Judaism of the earliest strata of the Old Testament is unique among religions in not seeming to raise the question of individual survival as a distinct problem. But in later Judaism, in the Hasidic tradition, in the prayers to be said by the dying, the question about survival is not answered ambiguously.
In the last document in the book [Jewish Reflections on Death edited by Rabbi Jack Riemer], the reproduction of an “ethical will” written in recent years, we find the following. First, there is a slightly joking passage in which the writer, after saying that he hopes to live to see all his children happily married, adds: “if not, I’ll be watching from somewhere anyway.” Later, he writes: “To us as Jews, life is its own raison d’être, its own self-justification; we await neither heaven nor hell.” Again: “the only immortality I seek is that my children and my children’s children be good Jews, and thereby good people.” But compare this with what we find in the earlier tradition.
The Rabbi of Berditchev said before he died that when he arrived up there he would not rest nor be silent, nor would he allow any of the holy ones to rest or be silent until the Messiah should come. But when he came there the beauties and wonders of heaven overwhelmed him, so that he forgot about this.’

(…)

‘For most men such considerations make the hypothesis of survival impossibly difficult. If it were easy, if dying were like going to the mountains in the hot weather, death would not be terrible. On the contrary hypothesis, that to die is to become nothing, death can’t be terrible either, for there was a time when I was not, and this doesn’t shake the mind—does it? But death is terrible with a sacred terror that is simply a datum of the human condition; and for the dying and the dead there is a reverence that belongs to natural piety, just as there is a reverence of a like kind for human sexuality. If we were to come to find such reverence a clog upon our freedom, something that doesn’t go with intellectual enlightenment, we had better look forward to a society in which the bodies of the dead are put out with the garbage. Would there then be an Antigone to confront the sanitary regulations?’

Read the article here.

Cure extraordinary misery, embrace normal misery, that’s happiness according to Freud. I can only agree with him.

After all, the grim outlook is the cheerful outlook.

Becker’s book is still one of the finest I’ve ever read on the human condition.

Most of us don’t know how to die, but we do it anyhow. That’s a small comfort, just slightly bigger than the comfort of eternal life. Who wants eternity on this planet?

As to the joke about the Messiah: He should be forgotten.

Culture is a hero-system, according to Becker, I would say that we cannot give up trying to become heroes, we might just do it with a sense of self-irony.

Instead of waiting for the Messiah, become your own Messiah.

Local messianism. Messianism in the bathroom. Outside the bathroom it becomes dangerous right away.