Uit de leeszaal (42)

‘When you are young, you always expect that the world is going to end. And then you get older and the world still chugs along and you are forced to re-evaluate your stance on the apocalypse as well as your own relationship to time and death. You realize that the world will indeed continue, with or without you, and the pictures you see in your head. So you try to understand the pictures instead.
(…)
In modern middle-class culture, the absence of death in most people’s early years creates a psychic vacuum of sorts. For many, thoughts of a nuclear confrontation are one’s first true brush with nonexistence, and because they are the first, they can be the most powerful and indelible. Later in life, more sophisticated equations for death never quite capture that first intensity – the modern sex/death formula; mysterious lumps; the mental illness of friends; the actual death of loved ones – all of life’s painful gifts. At least this is what I tell myself to explain these pictures in my head that will not go away.’
[Douglas Coupland, Life after God, p. 108-109]