∞
Does the world need my books?
I’m writing a book about death. This book will be Jagunbae’s first publication.
I was nervous when I decided to close my restaurant to start a publisher. My heart said I was on the right path, but I wasn’t sure if my creation could be a meaningful contribution to the ever-growing space of information.
My mind played the same question over and over. Does the world need more books? More specifically, does the world need my books?
∞
Bertrand Russell
Some old people are oppressed by the fear of death. . . . The best way to overcome it is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls.
∞
Notes from Being Mortal by Atul Gawande
“What tormented Ivan Ilyich most,” Tolstoy writes, “was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill, and he only need keep quiet and undergo a treatment and then something very good would result.
We did little better than Ivan Ilyich’s primitive nineteenth-century doctors—worse, actually, given the new forms of physical torture we’d inflicted on our patient.