“It is the certainty of death that finally makes a life acceptable”
“As my own death approaches, I weigh the life I have lived against what it might have been. I ask myself: Could I have been wiser? Could I have done more? When I look at my life this way from the end, I can take satisfaction that I mostly gave it my all and did what I could… It is the certainty of death that finally makes a life acceptable. When we live as fully as we can, what room is left for regret?”
David Horowitz, Mortality & Faith: Reflections on a Journey through Time
In an article that will appear later this week, I wrote that “David Horowitz first came down with cancer after 9/11. He wrote about that in ‘The End of Time’. He continued fighting cancer and writing about his experiences facing death in ‘A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in This Life and the Next‘. He nearly died in 2015 and wrote about that in ‘You’re Going to Be Dead One Day: A Love Story’ and then collected all three together in ‘Mortality and Faith’ in 2019.”
This excerpt from that collection has David contemplate the question of his own mortality. And though he lived long after that contemplation, it is central to who he was as a writer, as a thinker and as a man.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
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