Born Alone, Die Alone: What Does This Mean?

[Laurence Horn]

On Oct 24, 2011, at 3:06 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

>> I'm living like there's no tomorrow....
>
> Does anybody have any *practical* advice on how to do this?
>
> Signed,
>
> Curious.
>

Well, you start by living like there's Tuesday before Thanksgiving and work backward from there.

LH
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 2:06 PM, Garson O'Toole
> <adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com> wrote:
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Garson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: Born Alone, Die Alone: What Does This Mean?
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> [Begin comment by Fred Shapiro]
>> I apologize for my cluelessness, but there is a quote by Steven Jobs
>> that is getting some publicity and that makes no sense to me.  He
>> said, "You're born alone, you're going to die alone."  What does this
>> mean?  Many people die alone, but many do not, and it is not clear to
>> me that anyone is born alone.  Some babies are given birth by mothers
>> in secretive circumstances and the mother dies in childbirth, but this
>> is unusual and the baby may quickly die when this happens.
>> [End comment by Fred Shapiro]
>>
>> Here is one guess for the meaning Jobs was trying to communicate:
>>
>> The subjective experience of dying is solitary: Jobs may have thought
>> this proposition was true even if one was surrounded by loving
>> individuals. Jobs expressed ambivalence and uncertainty about the
>> possible existence of an "afterlife". He may have thought that if an
>> afterlife existed then one would enter it alone.
>>
>> The subjective experience of birth is solitary: It is not clear how
>> well developed the neural system is at birth. If it is well developed
>> enough that it is possible to speak of a subjective experience then
>> emerging through the birth canal would presumably be a solitary
>> experience.
>>
>> Here are some quickly obtained unverified GB matches:
>>
>> 1847, The journey of life by Catherine Sinclair
>> [Begin excerpt]
>> Since, then, we are not only born alone, but must die alone, why
>> should so much of our intermediate time be spent in avoiding to remain
>> alone with our own thoughts?
>> [End excerpt]
>>
>> 1861, Eighty sketches of sermons by Francis Close
>> [Begin excerpt]
>> We are born alone, must die alone, and must "every one of us give an
>> account of himself to God." (Rom. xiv. 12.)
>> [End excerpt]
>>
>> There is a GB match in 1853 that really seems to be from 1862, and
>> some other possible matches in the 1860s. I didn't look in any other
>> databases.
>>
>> The religious quotations seem to be connected to the belief that the
>> moral evaluation of a life will be performed for each individual human
>> life.
>>
>> In recent times a script writer for the television series Mad Men used
>> the expression according to WikiQuote
>>
>> http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mad_Men
>>
>> Smoke Gets in Your Eyes [1.1]
>>
>> Don Draper: The reason you haven't felt it is because it doesn't
>> exist. What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.
>> You're born alone and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch
>> of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts. But I never
>> forget. >I'm living like there's no tomorrow, because there isn't one.
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
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