Ernest Becker, The Denial of DeathCan’t decide if this was the best book to have read this wee

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Can’t decide if this was the best book to have read this week or the absolute worst book to have read this week.

Elisa Gabbert summed it up quite nicely in her 2021 year-end roundup:

17. The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker (1973) — I heard about this book from a Louise Glück poem. It must be having a moment, because all my library’s copies were checked out already, so I bought one. I had the immediate sense that it belongs to the canon of books that, like Hyperobjects and Crowds and Power, explain everything. It’s all about how our motivation in all things is the fear of death, hence we have to align ourselves with some greater symbolic power, a big lie from beyond, that allows us a sense of “cosmic specialness,” allows us to feel heroic, to deny death, to deny our ultimate fate as “complex and fancy worm food.” Religion, in the past, made this easy, providing a ready-made meaning-of-life and assurance of immortality if we followed the rules. Modernity has made it more difficult, more of a figure-it-out-yourself affair, and many of us struggle our whole lives to find (or invent) a kind of meaning we can believe in, to feel like we have some control over nature. Art is one way; for worse people, there’s war. The language and some of the thinking around gender, sexuality, and mental illness is outdated and kind of ~yikes~ but regardless, this is full of good insights and writing and ideas. Really enjoyable in its sweep. Concludes on the limits of psychotherapy: “Not everyone is as honest as Freud was when he said that he cured the miseries of the neurotic only to open him up to the normal misery of life.” Here are some more choice quotes: “Religions like Hinduism and Buddhism performed the ingenious trick of pretending not to want to be reborn, which is a sort of negative magic: claiming not to want what you really want most.” “This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it.” “The narcissistic project of self-creation, using the body as the primary base of operations, is doomed to failure.” “Man’s body is a problem to him that has to be explained.” “Full humanness means full fear and trembling.” “In a word, illness is an object … At least it makes us feel real and gives us a little purchase on our fate.” “Neurosis is today a widespread problem because of the disappearance of convincing dramas of heroic apotheosis of man.” “The jump doesn’t depend on man after all — there’s the rub: faith is a matter of grace.” “He has to go the way of the grasshopper, even though it takes longer.” “Life itself is the insurmountable problem.”