LIFE is too short. Perhaps no single force has worked so powerfully on man as his knowledge that he must surely die. Whole civilizations have been built in death's dominion: the Egyptians turned their land into a vast necropolis, and the Aztecs conquered Mexico not for booty but for human sacrifices to blunt the lethal appetites of their man-eating gods. Trying to cope with the dreadful and perplexing fact of death, man has erected great intellectual edifices; philosophers as far apart as Socrates and (2,300 years after him) Karl Jaspers have held that the essence of philosophy is preparation for death....
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