Think of Yourself as Dead
You have lived your life. Now, take what’s left and live it properly.
“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what’s left and live it properly. What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.” ― Marcus Aurelius
In December 1849, Fyodor Dostoevsky stood on a scaffold in a Saint Petersburg square facing a death sentence. He was twenty-eight, a brilliant writer, condemned for reading the wrong books with friends. Scared shitless, he watched the priest, the rifles, the first men tied to their posts. He had perhaps a minute left.
Then suddenly- a drum, an officer, and an envelope came to the scene. He had been pardoned the day before. The sentence was a hoax to teach them a lesson.
The man who walked off that square was grateful, obviously, but quite different. Before it, Dostoevsky was a promising novelist who wrote like a man who assumed he’d have decades to do his best work- hence always half-committed, distracted. After it, something in him died. He went to a Siberian prison camp and came back and wrote like a man with nothing left to lose: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov- classic widely read books that go to the heart of the things most writers circle. He stopped saving himself for later. He no longer had the patience for trivialities, for the small careful dull life.
Dostoevsky needed a death sentence to live well. To master his mind and emotions. To turn out great. You only need to think clearly for the length of this essay.
See, a lot happens when we die: decomposition, worms, a foul smell.
But I want you to contemplate what happens to the realm of sensation.
Observe.
Fear has no hold of you when you’re dead. Neither does…