

Death’s Fork in the Road
In a span of a few weeks, I was confronted with two distinct views on death and two distinct ways of dying. In one was the illusion of self-mastery; in the other, the radical surrender of self.
In a span of a few weeks, I was confronted with two distinct views on death and two distinct ways of dying. In one was the illusion of self-mastery; in the other, the radical surrender of self.
Today, it is all too common to prize self-sufficiency as a virtue—a virtue by nature inaccessible to the sick and to the disabled, to pregnant women and to the elderly, and to children of any age.
Whilst I’m reluctant to trivialise the many mental health illnesses and anxieties that modern people claim, I suspect that much of their emotional confusion is just what everyone normally feels. The difference being, however, that the young modern was told that such feelings had been—or would be with the next cultural revolution—banished by Progress.
The development of a synthetic mouse embryo from stem cells to the stage of developing organs raises hopes among the scientific community that the time for such experiments with human embryos is near.