Thursday, June 04, 2009

What Was This Lady Thinking (An Interpretation of Death)

I came across this on CNN today.


Watching this just makes me wonder what the lady was thinking? Maybe she wasn't paying attention and was heading across the tracks when she finally noticed a trail hurtling towards her, so she did the only logical thing she could think of: make like a sheet of paper and lay flat. Or maybe she is a thrill seeker? But the embedded code has a tag that says "israel.suicide.attempt", so perhaps she was trying to check out early. Anyway, this lady was very fortunate to have no injuries, namely death.

Which brings up an interesting point. When you consider injuries in an accident, is death really considered an injury? First we must define injury. Dictionary.com says an injury is a "harm or damage that is done or sustained." Using this definition, then some forms of death seem to fit, but not all. For instance, dying of "natural causes", that is, growing old, falling asleep, and not waking up, does not seem to fit the injury definition. There is no damage done to the body in the sleeping process, only a peaceful ending to a life. But a gun shot wound to the brain causes all kinds of serious damage to the body and often ends in death.

Aha! Perhaps my hypothesis was flawed from the beginning. Death, it seems, is not an injury. Instead, one may die from their injuries, but that does not mean that death is an injury. I don't know about you all, but this solves a great mystery that I've honestly never thought about before starting this post. My mind is often prone to wandering, through the hazy fields of absolutes and uncertainties.

One final note on death. Coldplay's latest full-length album, Viva la Vida, subtitled Death and All His Friends, was really an excellent album. They always produce such amazing pieces of music, and this album was no different. I get emails from the band, and their last email contained a link to download a free live concert cd, which is titled LeftRightLeftRight. I thought I'd share that with you fine folks. Follow the link here to get your copy of LRLR. Also, I did a poem post on Coldplay a while back, which is available here.

As always, remember to brush your teeth when you wakey wakey and right before you go to bed!

5 comments:

Poison said...

I think I know what happened to that lady. She read Reaper Man and Soul Music and Hogfather and she wanted to meet Death in person.

Except that the Death of Earth and the Death of Discworld are two different entities (I was gonna say anthromorphic whatyoumaycallit but I can't spell it right).

God I sound like a fangirl.

logankstewart said...

Did you read Nation? I've not read any of the Discword books, though I own a copy of the Color of Magic.

(And welcome to Rememorandom)

marky said...

What a poor wee soul. She's got to be messed up in the head. I hope she gets some help, fast!

What's really messed up though, is that somebody will watch that on the news and think that they can do the same, to impress their buddies.........Yeah, I want to try it. Don’t judge me!

How's the new pad dude? Settled yet?

logankstewart said...

Egads! Marky, I hadn't thought about that. I sure hope no one tries to pull that off from watching on my blog.

I'm working on getting settled in, slowly but surely. If I unpack one box per day then I'm pleased; unfortunately, the wife and I have a lot of boxes.

Krista said...

CRAZY! What in the world....?!