I’ve spent hours and hours gardening and I’ve been auditing a wonderful course on Heidegger’s Being and Time. That too, is all about death. Heidegger lived through the Spanish Flu of 1918-19 and was probably germinating the core ideas of his great early work even as it raged through Europe hand in hand with the Great War, taking an estimated fifty million lives, and it’s hard to imagine that his work wasn’t colored by the times and the experience of waiting out the horrors, in light of which I’m tempted to suggest that life is a pandemic, that we’re infected from the outset.

¶ 7:43 AM