"Philosphy is preparation for death; in this it resembles all other human endeavors."

Writing for three different blogs is, in part, a manifestation of my fragmented personality. The Helen who is addressing you at the moment is the big softie—I'm gonna die, and so is everyone that anyone has ever loved, but damn, girl, do you have to be so cavalier about it? If I may be permitted to move from schizophrenia to meta-schizophrenia, I'll try to explain why I am rhetorically reckless about death even to the point of naming this blog after a habit that might kill me and, second, why I'm not as rhetorically reckless about death as you think I am.

The first shard of your broken teakettle, then: There's no one culprit for my belief that all time is plague time, not even my misspent existentialist youth; every philosophy I've ever been attracted to has glorified fortitude, and fortitude depends upon an indifference to death. It's a hard virtue to develop—smoking helps, and so does having the sister I do (to the extent that coming to terms with her profound disability resembles grieving). But a love of courage—or, to put it less charitably, an eagerness to err on the side of recklessness rather than timidity—is a philosophical thread I've never lost track of. ("If philosophy is preparation for death, then anything that prepares for death is philosophical": a new maxim to corrupt the youth?)

But there never was a one-handed blogger, and if, as I write this post, I have a cigarette in my left hand, my more charitable hand holds a copy of J. G. A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment. Pocock was tailor-made for pomocons: he explains the conservative attitude toward death in terms of loyalty to the universal versus loyalty to the particular. A universalist, he explains, is a man who cannot understand why any good thing should ever have to end; the particularist realizes that embracing contingent, time-bound, and finite things requires embracing their finitude. I will love America until it dies, and, when it dies, I will love its death as an appropriate ending to the story. (For those who take their philosophy with a twist of eschatology: Atheists have a tough time understanding how Christians can believe that it will be good when this world is replaced by a better one and yet also believe that it is good, for the moment, that this world continue to exist. That's why the conflict between particularism and Christianity has never bothered me; the other side has a worse case of the universalism bug than we do.)

Being a traditionalist means loving the particular; loving the particular means loving the finite; accepting finitude means accepting that sometimes it's good when good things come to an end, lives no less than republics. This is not to say that death should not be the occasion for grief. (Indeed, a special sensitivity to premature death depends upon some idea of mature death.) My only intention here is to assure anyone put off by tobacco apologetics that my willingness to taunt the Reaper is (partly but) not exclusively a function of youth's delusions of invincibility.