The Last Wonder: D.H. Lawrence on Death and the Best Lifelong Preparation for It

“Know thyself, and that thou art mortal. But know thyself, denying that thou art mortal.”

“To study philosophy is to learn to die,” Montaigne wrote in his most famous essay as he reckoned with how to live. Indeed, we spend our lives learning to die while trying to bear our mortality, using our religions and our materialism to look away from the great unknown, to fill with myths and negations what is undeniably the supreme mystery on the other edge of existence. We may know what happens to our p...