So it may not be springtime...

but I am 20.

                                                                                   A.E.Housman

Okay, okay, so I finally decided to write something. Don't get used to it though. :) This mostly exists so I can view other peoples xangas with greater ease.

Several of my memories from growing up in the country that begin with finding a baby raccoon or an injured bird and end with my mother's less than satisfactory consolation that "at least they died somewhere safe and warm." Those are probably some of the earliest memories I have that include some sort of awareness of death. However, it seems that for the most part an awareness of death is absent from our lives. I do not reget advances in medicines or wish for war at home or some other form of suffering and loss to be more prolific, but it seems that we have lost something by shoving death and any reminders of it from our vision. Think about the basic idea and response to aging. A brief look at American society reveals a tendency to hide any appearance of againg. When it is no longer possible to maintain such appearances the elderly are shuffled off into retirement homes so as not to remind the rest of that their fate is our own. We seem to flee from any reminders that we all age, in time our bodies and  often our minds will fail us and then we will die. (It reminds me of a sketch that Jacob brought back from Rome of the Bone Chapel which had the inscription "What you are now we once were, what we are now you will be" placed in a interior made entirely out of human bones.) I realize that I'm making generaliztions, but I think it present at least to some extent. I certainly am not trying to assert that fear of death is something new, but by removing reminders of death do we lose some of our ability to appreciate life. In my Lit class last fall we got into a great discussion along this same strain while studying the Iliad. The basic questions that arose were: Can the act of taking a life force one to acknowledge the value of life itself? Has our view of the value of life diminished since we live in a society were the taking of life is not as prevelant as say, amongst the ancient Greeks of the Iliad? (For those of you unfamiliar with the Iliad it is set in the last year of the Trojan war and in the course of telling its story gives account to more than a few deaths.) I don't have any satisfactory answers at the moment to such questions. Any thoughts?

P.S. The fact that this is my only really xanga entry probably makes me appear incredibly morbid. Really I'm not. Though I do think too much and have a weird sense of humor.