There is no place on earth where death cannot find us

I am ruthless about throwing out books that displease me -- the fiction is flabby or the story is mawkish -- so when I need to find a book that has meant something to me in the past, it's easy to find because it's one that has survived. My prize books are on the bookshelf on my side of the bedroom. All others can be stored somewhere else in the house but the best ones have to stay nearby.

One of the books that has survived several literary purges in my house in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche. I'll probably mention this more in the coming days and weeks. I don't pay any attention to the parts about reincarnation; it's the Buddhist idea of death being such an important part of life that interested me.

One of the passages in the book quotes Montaigne:

There is no place on earth where death cannot find us - even if we constantly twist out heads about in all directions as in a dubious and suspect land … If there were any way of sheltering from death's blows - I am not the man to recoil from it … But it is madness to think that you can succeed …

Men come and they go and they trot and they dance, and never a word about death. All well and good. Yet when death does come - to them, their wives, their children, their friends - catching them unawares and unprepared, then what storms of passion overwhelm them, what cries, what fury, what despair! …

To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind that death … We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. -- Michel de Montaigne 1533-1592