BW. Let's begin with Lucretius, who was right to say that if we can't mourn our loss of life in relation to the time before we were born, we can also not mourn our loss after we die, since death is annihilation, especially of consciousness. And if that is so, it is a mistake to impute consciour concerns to the experience of the deceased human organism. The mistake is imagining that consciousness will persist in death. That confuses a fear of the unknown with the fact of annihilation. That is why Lucretius concluded that "death is nothing to us, and does not matter at all.
TN. You accept, too, that Lucretius declared that it did not matter when anybody died (W 80), but you don't buy that argument, right? Surely you're not saying that it doesn't matter when anybody dies. It matters plenty. I give the example of the difference between the deaths of Keats at 24 and Tolstoy at 82. The death of the younger man deprived himself and the world of Keats poetry.
BW. Yes, but by that logic you could extend and extend and extend the argument, such that we have to be "committed to wanting to be immortal" (W 80).
TN. All I'm saying is that if we say that life is good, and even though we know that immortality is a physical impossibility, then we can contemplate "what it would be for him to go on existing indefinitely" and that "continuation [of life] would have been good" for the one who dies (N 79). You can accept Lucretius with regard to the absence of consciousness before birth, but I do not accept Lucretius' idea that "death is simply the mirror image of the prior abyss" (79), still less that the abyss of death is irrelevant no matter when or who dies at what age or from what. To the contrary, the experience of life opens consciousness to the possibilities of life, indeed to the fact of life as a gift. The gift is that the cosmos becomes available, only to become unavailable because of death: "any death entails the loss of some life that ...