While everybody is an amateur at death, that doesn’t stop us from trying to learn enough to defeat it. Or, possibly, just learn enough to come to terms with it.

In 1580 Montaigne wrote a wonderful essay entitled “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die” – the whole thing is worth a read, but I particularly like

Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death.

It was at the local library that I first remember realizing how much life and death are intertwined. Pawing through books in a basement corner at the earliest numbers the Dewey decimal system. But this didn’t feel like a nonfiction section. I’m pretty sure some PBS program taught me that nonfiction equals facts. But were these facts?

The paranormal. The occult. The unconscious. Stuff about the bible, but also stuff about aliens. This section was great.

Some things are natural. Some things a unnatural (non-natural, if you will). And some things are supernatural. Why not fiction, nonfiction, and superfiction?

The Dewey Decimal System classifies the 100 section as Philosophy. The 100 section stretches from Metaphysics (110) to Modern Western Philosophy (190), with my early love, Parapsychology & Occultism (130) right in the middle. Seems that to study death is to learn to philosophize.