its victim would have led had he not died at that or any earlier point" (79). How does that not link death to the evil of truncating life? Or, as I have said, "the direction of time is crucial in assigning possibilities to people or other individuals" (79).
BW. One could say that you are confusing death with dying or with other kinds of misfortune (evil) that can also truncate life: poverty, the Holocaust, repressive political regimes, disease. I'm not denying that there is something against life in whatever will limit one's access to life's possibilities.
TN. It seems to me that you still cannot effectively answer my conclusion that "a bad end is in store for us all" (N 80), or in other words, that death is always an evil to the degree it truncates life that a person might otherwise have had.
BW. You can't say that without a great deal of qualification, and the qualification you are missing is the quality of life vis-a-vis the prospect of death. I give the example of the Makropulos case--fiction, yes, but still evocative of the limits of possibility. The enormous sadness of the woman who at age 342 is bored: "Everything is joyless: 'in the end it is the same . . . singing and silence'" (W 82). I haven't made exactly this point before, but what I describe in sighting the limits of immortality is that here is a woman who is in the position of mourning her own life because it is life, and of taki
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