Antony,
Louise: Philosophers Without Gods
Aristotle: Nicomachean
Ethics
Ayer, Alfred:
Language Truth and Logic
Barnes,
Julian: Nothing to be Frightened Of
Beauchamp,
Tom: Philosophical Ethics
The Bhagavad
Gita
The Bible
Bulfinch, Thomas: Bulfinch's Mythology
Bulfinch, Thomas: Bulfinch's Mythology
Camus,
Albert: The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel, The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall
Confucius
Conrad,
Joseph: Heart of Darkness
Dawkins, Richard:
The God Delusion
Dennett,
Daniel: Breaking the Spell
Doidge,
Norman: The Brain that Changes Itself
Dostoevsky,
Fyodor: Notes from Underground, The Brothers Karamazov: “Rebellion,” “The Grand
Inquisitor”
Ehrman, Bart:
God’s Problem, Jesus Interrupted
Frankena,
William: Ethics
Gardner,
John: Grendel
Greene, Brian: Until the End of Time
Greene, Brian: Until the End of Time
Haidt, Jonathan:
The Righteous Mind
Harris, Sam:
The Moral Landscape, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation
Hawking,
Stephen: A Brief History of Time, Brief Answers to the Big Questions
Hesse,
Hermann: Demian
Hick, John:
Philosophy of Religion
Hitchens, Christopher:
God Is Not Great, Portable Atheist
Hume, David:
An Inquiry Concerning the Principle of Morals, An Inquiry Concerning Human
Understanding
Joyce, James:
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz:
The Trial
Kaku, Michio:
Parallel Worlds
Kant, Immanuel:
Theory of Ethics
Kaufmann,
Walter: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to
Sartre
Kazantzakis,
Nikos: Zorba the Greek
Kierkegaard,
Soren: Philosophical Fragments
King, Martin
Luther: Why We Can’t Wait
Lao Tzu
Malraux,
Andre: Man’s Fate
Mann, Thomas:
Death in Venice
Matson, Wallace: The Existence of God
Matson, Wallace: The Existence of God
McLean,
George: Readings in Ancient Western Philosophy
Melville,
Herman: Moby Dick
Mencius
Mill, John
Stuart: Essay on Liberty, Utilitarianism
Munitz,
Milton: Theories of the Universe
Nelson,
William: Morality: What’s in It for Me?
Nietzsche,
Friedrich: Twilight of the Idols, The Anti-Christ
Olson,
Robert: “Problems in Ethics,” “Problems in the Philosophy of Religion
Plato:
Crito, Symposium, Republic
Pinker,
Steven: The Blank Slate, The Stuff of Thought, “The Moral Instinct”
Randall,
Lisa: Warped Passages
Rawls, John:
A Theory of Justice
Robinson,
John: Honest to God
Robinson, Timothy: God
Robinson, Timothy: God
Russell,
Bertrand: Unpopular Essays, Why I am Not a Christian, “Is There a God”
Sagan, Carl:
Billions & Billions
Sartre,
Jean-Paul: Nausea, No Exit
Schopenhauer,
Arthur: The World as Will
Shakespeare,
William: MacBeth, King Lear, Hamlet
Shermer,
Michael: The Science of Good and Evil, How We Believe
Sire, James:
The Universe Next Door
Smith,
Huston: The Religions of Man
Stenger,
Victor: God the Failed Hypothesis
Taylor, A.E.:
Elements of Metaphysics
Taylor,
Richard: Metaphysics
Thoreau, Henry:
Walden
Tillich,
Paul: Dynamics of Faith, Systematic Theology
Tolstoy, Leo:
The Death of Ivan Ilych
Tomlin,
E.W.F.: The Oriental Philosophers
Twain, Mark:
Letters from the Earth
The Upanishads
The Upanishads
Watts, Alan:
Beyond Theology, Myth and Ritual in Christianity
Wilson,
Edward: “The Biological Basis of Morality”
Wittgenstein,
Ludwig: Philosophical Investigations, On Certainty
For My Eulogist by Glen Brown
ReplyDeleteTell them I did not want a church and prayers,
a priest’s hopeful praising
of an invisible deity and illogical immortality;
that I believed what a Pulitzer Prize poet once wrote:
“God knows nothing we don’t know.
We gave Him every word He ever used.”
Tell them I did not want a coffin and flowers either—
that rewind of god-awful dreariness and solemnity;
nor did I want collages or a slide show. Instead,
share a few of my favorite poems and tell stories;
play music, preferably performed;
and have lots of raucous laughter.
Let slip that I kept a childhood charm,
not owing to superstition or religious belief,
but only because the Vatican had “eternally released
[Christopher’s] duty and sainthood”
when they decided he was more legend than reality.
Be sure to tell them how much I loved irony.
Tell them moments are what we are
and to never stop asking questions;
that I was an existential empiricist to the end,
a born-again skeptic and blogger;
that “One life was [not] as good as another;
that it does matter” how we live each day
and to never “miss out on being alive
in a world where everything is given,
and nothing [can be] explained [with certainty].”
But confess to them how I wanted to die
before my wife did out of fear,
and how I was afraid of pension theft.
Tell them how I was terrified
of losing a child most of all,
the way some of my dear friends had lost theirs,
and how I worried about the harmful choices
my children sometimes made.
Divulge that dementia was in my narrative too,
if I had lived long enough
like my grandmother and father,
and how frightened I was about erasing
my identity by cyber crooks;
that it’s best to safeguard our money,
as long as “our heart is spent.”
And tell them how much I loved teaching
and it is through music, philosophy,
poetry, literature and art that show us
how to be.
And don't forget to tell them
how much I loved singing and playing
the Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, and Neil Young
on my guitars, and listening to Mozart and Chopin,
the blues, and jazz—when it’s bluesy—and reading
Dunn, Dickson, Djanikian,
Collier, Collins, Hoagland and other poets.
Remind them how much I savored
my books, handguns, and black Lexuses
(as much as I craved dark chocolate)
and saving unwrinkled money —
things left behind to prove this dead collector
also lived comfortably,
and that I loved caramel apples,
apple fritters, apple turnovers, apple cheesecake
and, of course, my mother,
but not America’s hegemony, bigotry
and political hypocrisy.
Proclaim how I loved my tabby cats,
my dearest friends and family,
and my beautiful wife, Marilyn —
“For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!”
And that nights filled with stars,
my mother’s Calabrian cooking
and sewing machine’s hum,
the baseball glove’s oily perfume
and the spring’s night air,
bright autumn days, the crow’s cawing,
the wind’s homily swishing through trees,
wind chimes and crunching through leaves
were warm memories of my childhood heart.
And that it is old age who arrives
unannounced one day
emptying his suitcase of inflictions.
And death is the final costume we will all wear
and “nowhere but where it will occur”
and is not mine to keep,
because it will belong to you someday.
So exaggerate right now:
tell them I said something noteworthy
before I died, but that you
have since forgotten what it was,
though you think I might have whispered
Beethoven’s final words:
“Plaudite, amici, comoedia finita est”—
Applaud, my friends, for the comedy is finally over —
from my other poem about dying
and my hope to leave an éclat to posterity.
Or was it something else I might have said?
A cliché perhaps?
Like everything of value in life
is revealed through what we loved.