So here I am discovering and loving the thoughts of Alan Watts, and a reader tells me Matt Stone and Trey Parker have been there before and even made this very cool cartoon about "music and life," based on Alan Watts' thoughts. I doubt very much I would have appreciated Watts' sentiments had I not been forced to accept the idea that I might have a much-shortened life-span over a decade ago. But awareness of mortality is the one great thing that we moderns tend to overlook. I was lucky in a way to be reminded before I was thirty, just as one's natural human hubris tends to peak. To philosophize is to learn how to die. And thereby how to live.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2007/05/a-small-world/228916/
