Immortality (42 page)

The Douglas Adams quote is from the third of the five
Hitchhiker
books,
Life, the Universe and Everything
(Pan Books, 1982). Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Immortal” was first published in his collection
The Aleph
in 1949 (available in translation in a Penguin Modern Classics edition) and can also be found in the Penguin Modern Classics collection of Borges’s work
Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings
. Irvin D. Yalom’s experiences of the transformational power of mortality awareness can be found in his books
Existential Psychotherapy
(Basic Books, 1980) and
Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death
(Jossey Bass, 2009).

The quote from J. B. Pratt is from his book
The Religious Consciousness
(Macmillan, 1920). The Alan Segal quote is from his aforementioned
Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion
, which contains a fascinating discussion of Near Eastern wisdom literature. The quote from the tomb of King Intef is taken from the aforementioned
Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt
by John H. Taylor. The Michel de Montaigne quote is from his aforementioned essay “To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die.”

Very few of Epicurus’s own writings have survived. The quotes on the fear of death are taken from his “Letter to Menoeceus,” which, like all his surviving works, is short, well worth reading and found in various editions. I have used the translation by John Gaskin in
The Epicurean Philosophers
(Everyman, 1995). The Shakespeare quote is from
Measure for Measure
. The Wittgenstein quote is from
Tractatus Logico Philosophicus
(Routledge, 1921).

The quote from psychologist Roy Baumeister is from his aforementioned
Meanings of Life
. All quotations and references to Marcus Aurelius are from his
Meditations
, of which many versions are available. I have mostly used the translation by Maxwell Stanifoth (1964), available from Penguin Books.
Meditations
is certainly the best surviving insight into Stoic thought. The Bertrand Russell quote is taken from his essay “How to Grow Old” in
Portraits from Memory and Other Essays
(George Allen, 1956). Irvin D. Yalom’s conclusions on managing death anxiety are in the above-mentioned
Staring at the Sun
.

Pierre Hadot’s thoughts on the lessons of Epicureanism and Stoicism are from
Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault
(translated by Michael Chase, Blackwell, 1995). The Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi quote is from “The Flow Experience and Its Significance for Human Pyschology” in the book
Optimal Experience: Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness
(edited by
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi, Cambridge University Press, 1988). The Harvard happiness study is reported in the journal
Science
(“A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind” by Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert 330, no. 6006 ([November 12, 2010], p. 932). Appreciating the present moment is also the core teaching of the bestselling
The Power of Now
by Eckhart Tolle (Hodder, 1999), which draws on many of these wisdom traditions.

The quote by Philodemus is taken from Hadot’s
Philosophy as a Way of Life
, which contains fascinating discussions of the ancient Greek philosophers’ approach to gratitude and the present moment. Professor Robert Emmons’s conclusions on the power of gratitude are taken from his book
Thanks! How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier
(Houghton Mifflin, 2007), from which I have also taken the Epictetus quote.