關於愛，我是個小學生。

Lately, when Todd May, a professor of philosophy in Clemson University, flew to New York to visit his dying step-grandma, on aboard the plane made an abrupt ascending as landing in La Guardia due to a careless commuter plane landing without taking into account the clearness of the air trip and air space of other planes, which aroused an aura of 911 where the whole crew in the plane seemed as if they had been a human missile again.

This made the professor revisit his life and the meaning of death when the aircraft brushed above so closely the antenna of the Empire State Building. He began to ponder why he had fear at that moment, and why he suddenly bewared that life was so precious. He had then a vivid and strong desire and motive to survive the eminent misfortune. And he realized that we humans had so little control over lifespans and future. He smelled the prepared sneak attack ofdeath.

Yet he had a counterintuitive in mind that humans did treasure their lives so much exactly because death was unpredictable death proved life to be limited and short. And this is the reason why people cherish the short time as best as they can.What is immortality? Does it only refer to merely an inexhaustible toil of filling time? Never! Immortality doesn't mean the unlimited time for us to do what we love doing. Loving a woman? Taking a trip around the world? Writing? Painting? How do we feel when, say, we've been doing those for 10,000 years? Surely we would lose the grip and be sick of them as another damn chores or routines coming every day around, cloying sweetness.

Yes, indeed it is but for death. "This is the paradox death imposes upon us: it grants us the possibility of a meaningful life even as it takes it away. It gives us the promise of each moment, even as it threatens to steal that moment, or at least reminds us that some time our moments will be gone. It allows each moment to insist upon itself, because there are only a limited number of them. And none of us knows how many." Professor May preferred to think that the paradox of death is the source not of despair, nor the limited hope that is allotted to us as human beings, but quite the contrary. 

We cannot live forever, well, at least for most of us, to be sure, but neither would we want to. We ought not to mind the fact that we will die, although we really would rather that it not be today, not tomorrow either. But it is precisely because we cannot control when to die, only to know we will die, that we can look upon our lives with more of the seriousness they're supposed to merit. 

Death takes away from us no more than it has conferred: lives whose significance lies in the fact they are not always with us. Part of our happiness lies in being able to inhabit that fact.

人之初，性本賤？我倒寧願說這是認知的美、是黑格爾、是二儀的奧秘。