The Last Enemy That Shall Be Destroyed Is Death

"...And then he greeted Death as an old friend, and went with him gladly, and, equals, they departed this life." -Beedle The Bard, Tale of the Three Brothers -Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. This statement captures an essence of stoic philosopher's concept of choosing suicide over non-virtuous life but another important condition is that s/he must be a wise person.

Musings On Mortality

Ancient philosophers as well as medieval ones often kept human skull on their writing desk, as a reminder of their own mortality. I read this long back and assumed that it is widely known but in the early years the idea appeared to me, as it would appear to most people - a freaky habit !

If at all a skull on your writing desk doesn't startle you to death when you doze off with your chin on the table and wake up to find two hollow sockets staring at you, it should at least obsess you with the idea of your own death! And people obsessed with their own deaths, (euphemistically called fatalists or nihilists) would definitely screw up their present lives as well as the lives of people close to them. So it must be one of those freaky things the ancients practiced because they had lots of free time and loads of silly ideas propagated by their wisest men who probably wouldn't be able to intellectually compete with some of the biggest dumb-asses of our time.