Here's a really cool video that talks about the idea of entropy. It is interesting to think about the relatedness of love and melancholy. It can very easily be related to The Magus.

Let's Talk About Death

After reading Kirra's and Lizzy's blogs about Dia de los Muertos and death, it got me thinking about one of my former honors seminars. In the seminar, "The Art of Science and Medicine" we talked a lot about death and we even had a few guests from hospice visit us to discuss death and dying. This was a really enlightening experience because I had never talked about death in such an open and non-morbid setting. We had a chance to describe to each other, ideally, how we would prefer to die. I think that death is such a taboo topic that most people just avoid the subject altogether. Like, we don't ever want to imagine the thought of our loved ones dying, so lets not talk about it ever. The people from hospice explained to us that sometimes this thought process can be toxic, because if you never talk about death with your loved ones, then they will never know your best interests when you're close to dying. For example, if you are no longer able to swallow food and must use a feeding tube to survive, would you rather just be dead instead?
I have personal experience with this also because I work in an assisted-living facility for dementia patients. Some of the residents have such severe dementia that they cannot speak, can hardly move, are incontinent, and need to be spoon-fed. Their families are faced with difficult questions of if their quality of life is good enough for them to even be alive anymore. I think that some of these questions could be answered if they had open discussion with each other earlier in life about how they would like to die.
Forgive me, for this is probably not an exact quote, but I remember Matt saying, "Death is something that is going to happen to all of us, so why not understand it?" It's true - death is inevitable and it helps to understand it. Just as one's birth is an important component of their life, so is their departure from life. Perhaps both should be celebrated, as in Dia de los Muertos. It at least may help to think of death as something not absolutely unfathomably awful, as Lizzy suggests.