the end of childhood is the beginning of personhood, and that childhood ends with a deliberate, purposeful, choreographed, culturally endorsed exposure to death. That is the meaning that initiation gives to death: It is the beginning of the life you seek, and it kicks in just when you want to begin taking up a place in the world and when you want to lose yourself in someone else. What is true is that you will die. It has always been true, but initiation turns dying from a feared thing into a known thing. This is the sanest reversal imaginable of our insistence that knowing you will die is the
...more
