Silence is neither consent nor dissent. We say it sends a message, but actually it maintains a vacuum. Silence is the negative space that draws our attention elsewhere - perhaps to what's around it, carefully arranged, as in an artwork - or perhaps anywhere else that seems more exciting or urgent or productive - which is the usual case in real life.

One way to handle the idea of death is to realize we all share in it. However afraid or horrified you might be, you are quite the opposite of alone. Every single person who has ever lived has this same threshold to cross. Almost every single person fears it. There is even something quite disgusting and rather humiliating about it. You lose all control over your body and begin to stink and gross people out and terrify them and sadden them, and they have to clean this up and put you in the ground. If a fart is embarrassing, it seems to me that dying is rather more so.

Another, similar way to handle the idea of death is to recognize that, in some sense, we are supposed to die. I'm not sure that I resonate much with the claim that "death is a part of life." Maybe it's just the wording. It seems to me that death is where life stops, and beyond: not per se a part of it. To call that "part" is a bit like calling the solar system and beyond "part of the sun." I'm not exactly sure I buy it. Anyway, I somehow relate better to the idea that we're meant to die. When your time comes, you aren't doing anything wrong. There was no escaping it. You did for so long, but now that is not how the universe is arranged. Now it is arranged so that you go to a state, or states, of death, whatever that, or those, might be.

When I was very little, I'm not sure where I got the idea, and why it was a preoccupation, but I was very interested in this thought that other worlds exist. I remember the day I realized that "world" had an ambiguous meaning. What is the world? The world, most would say, is this planet. Earth. And so yes, there must be other worlds, because there are other planets. But what about other worlds entirely, other universes? I believed those existed also. I was very young. This was 2-4, somewhere in there. I remember I was in bed for that "Earth is the world" realization, and it must have been the answer to a question I'd asked, and I don't know which parent had given the answer. But this bed was not the bed I had when I was 4-6. It was either when we lived in Paris, which would be up to when I was 3.5, or when we lived in various places on the East Coast, until I was about 4, and then I had that other bed in that new place in Florida, where we actually stayed a while (and my parents still have that place, and are in fact there right now). The "other worlds" idea was just a minor preoccupation until I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis. This turned my world upside down, in the sense that it seemed to be all about this feeling I had that other worlds must exist.

It's been a thread my entire life. Most people, I know - and I somehow knew in the "Earth is the world" moment, possibly because my mother or father said something to this effect - find much else to think about, and spend little if any time wondering about other worlds, which we can't reach. If we can't reach them, what does it matter if they exist? This is probably, on reflection, what my mother said. That's her style. And I think I remember the "planet Earth" aspect because it was new. Her side of the story, if you will, was different from how I was thinking. I wasn't thinking of "the world" as a particular planet, and "other worlds" as other planets. Nor was I thinking of any of this as in any way uninteresting. But she was slightly dismissive of "other worlds" and saw the whole thing in the very practical light of one planet or another.

It's funny how I can recover that it must have been her from the feeling, and from that, why I remembered the moment. The feeling was that her take was different from the one I knew, and that I knew my dad would respond to differently, and with more excitement. At first that was discomfort - a different take is always, if it's a good one, a bit uncomfortable. Surprise that upends how you're seeing is always a bit discomfiting. Even when you tend to enjoy that, there's a jolt, almost like an electric shock. Most people don't enjoy electric shocks. And the jolt doesn't have to be very fast, like a static shock as you touch your lips to the stream from a water fountain (true story, and quite strange) in winter, inside, at work.

Competitive fairness says that if I must suffer a wrong, we should all suffer that same wrong as a fair handicap. Cooperative fairness says that if I don't like what happens to me, I will try to stop it from happening to anybody. As you can see, two formulations of fairness lead to directly opposite actions.

(I put this on Facebook 10 years ago today and wouldn't change a word!)