My favourite things

I find I naturally gravitate toward movies or books centered around death and the meaning of life when I'm down. It's difficult for me to get my spirits up with a sugary pop song, a silly movie, a light-hearted book, or the diversion friends afford. It just doesn't work. I suppose it's because when death looks you in the face laughter becomes hollow, as do your own petty troubles.

Death is the great leveler, an unfortunate fact of life as certain as taxes. Yet death remains an abstract blackness ever to befall us later, not yet, and never now. Nothing provokes us to consider our own significance as death does.

The quest for meaning is a common theme in my list of favourites.

One marvelously depressing film that I have seen numerous times would be Kurosawa's Ikiru: upon discovering his imminent and inescapable death, one man begins a quietly terrifying search for meaning in a meaningless life.

There's Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the long short story that inspired Ikiru, that chronicles the final days of an unreflective man forced to come to terms with his death.

There's the film About Schmidt, an unsettling satire of a life not lived, unsettling largely because it satirizes you.

As for an honourable mention, there's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard's brilliant take on a couple of minor Shakespearean characters: we are at the mercy of the elements and our only talent, it would seem, is dying.

Each and every one of them is wonderfully depressing and, of course, highly recommended. They all bear the universal truth that only by truly embracing death can one truly embrace life. The question, then, to puzzle over, is what does it mean to truly embrace death? Carpe diem? Eat, drink, and be merry? What has my life been worth? More importantly, how do I judge its worth?