But human beings have great difficulty accepting and dwelling in such existential vulnerability. We fall into what the philosopher Martin Heidegger called idle talk—forms of discourse that serve to cover over our human finiteness and the finiteness of all those we love. We succumb to a kind of forgetfulness of our finite kind of being and to a forgetfulness of the terrible lesson we learned 11 years ago today.

¶ 1:46 PM