On the contrary, I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.Īnd yet, one line from Hume’s essay strikes me as especially true: “It is difficult,” he wrote, “to be more detached from life than I am at present.” While I have enjoyed loving relationships and friendships and have no real enmities, I cannot say (nor would anyone who knows me say) that I am a man of mild dispositions. Hume continued, “I am … a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions.”
In that time, I have published five books and completed an autobiography (rather longer than Hume’s few pages) to be published this spring I have several other books nearly finished. I have been lucky enough to live past 80, and the 15 years allotted to me beyond Hume’s three score and five have been equally rich in work and love. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.” “I have suffered very little pain from my disorder and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits.
“I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution,” he wrote. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favorite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was mortally ill at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.
#Lacaixa.es particulars how to
It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted. I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. But though ocular melanomas metastasize in perhaps 50 percent of cases, given the particulars of my own case, the likelihood was much smaller. The radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. But my luck has run out - a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. A MONTH ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health.