Up Here Alone

In the publicness with which we are with one another in our everyday manner, death is ‘known’ as a mishap which is constantly occurring — as a ‘case of death’. Someone or other ‘dies’, be he neighbour or stranger. People who are no acquaintances of ours are ‘dying’ daily and hourly. ‘Death’ is encountered as a well-known event occurring within-the-world. As such it remains in the inconspicuousness characteristic of what is encountered in an everyday fashion. The “they” has already stowed away an interpretation for this event. It talks of it in a ‘fugitive’ manner, either expressly or else in a way which is mostly inhibited, as if to say, “One of these days one will die too, in the end; but right now it has nothing to do with us.”

— Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

(via librariansaywhat-deactivated201)