Shekhar Natarajan

What do you do with life?

Just to create art and knowledge and whatnot.

It's not a complex answer, but it was like, yeah, that makes sense to me.

I don't need death for life to be meaningful.

I think the things that life encompasses are what are deeply meaningful, and it's precisely why death seems like this

existential tragedy beyond measure.

The kind of heart, the kind of mind that made Beethoven's music.

The kind of heart, the kind of mind that writes poetry.

Just like, what?

What they felt, for them to be eliminated, I can't understand that contrast.

I'm not equipped to make it make sense for me at the moment.

And I think that any attempt to romanticize it is a psychological way of acquiescing to something that would otherwise drive a psychotic.

Ernest Becker in his book, The Denial of Death, great psychoanalysis, an analytic book from the 70s,

said that the awareness of mortality drives human beings mad and that there's three solutions, psychological solutions that we use to deal with death awareness because we're the only animal that's like aware of its death long term.

The religious solution, the romantic solution, and the creative solution.

So the religious one is like, well, death isn't real.

We go back to God and everything's good.

The romantic solution is we'll put them on a pedestal.

And so now I'm like merging with my God by putting them on a pedestal.

But your gods eventually reveal their clay feet.