phil ringnalda

Mike Sanders asks:

Anybody have any thoughts on life and beyond? Any ideas when might be a good time to think about it?

As is so often the case, I’ll turn to The River Why for an answer:

Ma’s ideas about Life and Death were interesting. She claimed to have no Philosophy of Life at all and insisted that there was nothing anybody could know about death until they died, at which point it was too late to share one’s discoveries. One might expect a person with such indefinite opinions to take little interest in the metaphysical speculations of others, but this was just where Ma got interesting: she believed there was nothing to know, so there was nothing to say, therefore she could not bear to hear anybody, however learned or qualified, advancing theories of life and death. The Scientific View, the Christian View, the Existentialist View, the Oriental View—they were all one to her: Hogwash. I once heard her say that “talk ’bout croakin’ is fer preachers in churches, an’ preachers in churches are fer idiots with nothin’ more constructive t’do but set an’ listen to somebody ‘at don’t know nothin’ standin’ in a podlium talkin’ ’bout somthin’ nobody don’t know nothin’ about. Why Izaak Walton hisself says on the very last page o’ The Angler: ‘t’beget mortification we should frequent churches.’ Now what the hell’d a sane person wanna waste time gettin’ hisself mortified fer?”

Ripped out of context, but none the less: why the hell’d a sane person wanna waste time on Croakin’ Talk?