Death unto Boredom

Abstract

Being is time and time is finite. With death time ends. Meeting the end of time is linked to what Heidegger defines as the authenticity question confronting humankind, thus replicating the whole history of the human species relationship with death. Defining authenticity in this manner means to find some sense of this finitude. In this process of finding some kind of sense, and in spite of not finding any sense, one must, nevertheless, learn how to die. All our existence is the process of ‘being-towards-death’, as “in the midst of life, we are in death” (130 John 14:1-6). This finds an interesting echo in Heidegger’s “as soon as a man comes to life, he is at once old enough to die” and “to be is to be towards death.”2 Intriguingly, the Maltese language has no verb ‘to be’. The Maltese ‘to-be’ is abstracted into ‘I’. ‘Being-towards-death’ and its ars moriendi-vanitas-carpe diem-memento mori corollary has its various levels of interpretation and structural thought.