ABSTRACT
Here is a fact: We all know that we’ll die—intellectually, anyway, we know it; it’s the definition of being “a mortal.” And the corollary is that at any moment we might die. Most of the time we don’t think about these facts: a necessary, protective forgetting. Forgetting—or in Freud’s term, repression—can be on the side of life, just as the River Lethe has two banks, one demarking the realm of the dead, the other that of the living.
