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"You should be outside, far, far away from here, right this minute, visiting Machu Picchu ..."

By Ann Althouse

"... or a former Hungarian brothel that's now a cute artisanal bakery run by tiny singing lesbians, or visiting a giant musty old castle in Leipzig, or maybe taking lousy digital pictures of that Amazonian tribe that makes cute little earrings out of dried capybara testicles. Do it. Do it now."

A publishing trend about lists of 1,000 things you need to do "before you die."

Personally, I don't understand why getting all in people's faces about their impending death is going to get them going. I see those titles and think: Oh, I'm going to die? Well, then why make all the effort? I do these 1,000 things, and then it's not that I'm some wonderfully complex and enriched human individual. I'm just a corpse. Yes, yes, I know, you're about to tell me about the afterlife. But if there's an afterlife, I should be praying or doing good works, not galavanting around the globe or reading hundreds of novels or whatever these books want death to stimulate me into doing.

Full post as published by Althouse on March 07, 2008 (boomark / email).