The Book Against Death
Canetti spent fifty years refusing to accept mortality as wisdom, and the fragments assembled after his own death are furious, funny and entirely unreconciled.
Canetti kept notes against death for over fifty years, refusing to accept mortality as wisdom or consolation. Assembled after his own, the fragments are furious, funny, and entirely unreconciled, the record of an argument he never conceded. He rejects every consoling formula in turn, including the ones he catches himself reaching for, and the result is closer to a lifelong quarrel than to a book.
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Maria Popova
Having left chemistry to study philosophy, trading the science of life for the art of learning to die, Canetti, aged thirty-two, decides to write a book “against” death, defying it without denying it, this shadow of life that is also its spark, the very thing that makes it shimmer with aliveness. He would work on it for the next half century until his own death, filling two thousand pages with reflections and aphorisms posthumously distilled into The Book Against Death (public library).
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