But when we look more closely, we see that fear is not the only important response to the fact of death. Here it is useful to turn to the words of the Basque philosopher Miguel de Unamuno in The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations (1912):I am presented with arguments … to prove the absurdity of a belief in the immortality of the soul. But these ratiocinations do not move me, for they are reasons and no more than reasons, and one does not feed the heart with reasons. I do not want to die. No! I do not want to die, and I do not want to want to die. I want to live always, forever and ever. And I want to live, this poor I which I am, the I which I feel myself to be here and now, and for that reason I am tormented by the problem of the duration of my soul, of my own soul. I am the centre of my Universe, the centre of the Universe, and in my extreme anguish I cry, along with Michelet, ‘My I! They are stealing my I!’

“pracademic”—an academic who “learns by doing” and works with community partners to demonstrate the relevance of their work within and outside the ivory tower

It’s probably a lot easier to survive in Italy now without speaking Italian than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Yes. It’s easier for everybody never to be away from home. Even people travelling on train journeys no longer talk to anybody. They just send text messages to people who they’re close to. Funnily enough, all these means of communication mean that we actually communicate less with the people we don’t know.