Prática de Shadowing: O, Death! - Aprenda a falar inglês com vídeo
Criando lição...
1
Often I think about dying.
2
Now, I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person.
3
I am capable of forming coherent thoughts on a number of subjects.
4
But thoughts of death shatter me entirely.
5
I am helpless.
6
I am horrified.
7
I realize that in the words of Leo Tolstoy, as I live, I am being stuffed into a big, dark sack.
8
My warmest memories appear and immediately rush back into the past.
9
the smell of the Atlantic springtime, picking blackberries with my mother, running through the garden and catching fireflies in jars.
10
These memories I love so much become only reminders that one day I must die.
11
And suddenly every year is passing more quickly than the last.
12
This dread comes from the unknowable and unstoppable nature of death.
13
Why do we die?
14
What does death mean?
15
If we die, why do we live?
16
These questions are perhaps the most well-trodden of all.
17
History's greatest thinkers have pondered over death.
18
The wisest, most talented humans our Earth has ever produced have attempted to tackle this subject.
19
Yet, they have all failed. But why?
20
Where do I go from here?
21
As far as I can tell, there are two places we can seek an answer to death.
22
Man and nature.
23
Man presents us with science, and in the subject of death, science offers a white flag in a war.
24
Science can tell us the biomechanical, physiological realities of death.
25
It can tell us what happens to your body when you die, and how your body then decays.
26
While academically interesting, this does little to bring clarity to death.
27
It does nothing to help a person make peace with dying.
28
So I find the world's greatest scientists rendered somehow into uselessness.
29
Moving past science, we can look elsewhere.
30
Spiritualists, philosophers, whoever, they've all examined death.
31
I've read many of them.
32
The might of all of this intellectual force has been hurled at death time and time again.
33
I still find no answers.
34
Lots of questions, but no answers.
35
Surely I can expect nothing more.
36
People are writing about things they know nothing about.
37
When they so beautifully theorized about death, they had not died.
38
They were as ignorant then as I am now.
39
These writings are window dressing.
40
Beautiful, but ultimately without function in the face of death.
41
I'm being shoved into a sack.
42
Do I want it to have spots or stripes?
43
Of course, there's also God, religion, man's greatest shield against the reality of death.
44
I have a deep admiration for the religious, to have such faith, such conviction, in a storm of arguments to the contrary.
45
I believe this requires a tremendous and unique strength of character.
46
But like so many, I cannot bring myself to believe in God.
47
I'd like to believe in God, but I'm not strong enough.
48
I cannot look at the world around us, even with all of its beauty, and take seriously the idea of God.
49
What God gives a child cancer?
50
What God sends hurricanes to the poor?
51
No God of mine.
52
Religion can have no place in my conversation with death.
53
Without other solutions, I often look to nature.
54
Here we have vultures, hyenas, insects.
55
These creatures all thrive off the deaths of others.
56
In nature, animals die and leave opportunities for the other members of their ecosystem.
57
I do find beauty in this phenomenon.
58
How could a person not?
59
I wish this could provide me with some great comfort.
60
But I still find myself running into that same concrete wall.
61
The conclusion of nature does nothing to abate the paralyzing feeling I get when I think about death.
62
You see, reason and hope become grotesquely meaningless when posed with these questions.
63
The truth, the truth that I know with all of my body, is that there can be no answer.
64
In fact, the only answer is the hopelessness I feel when I think about death.
65
And so all I can do is live.
66
The only thing I can find that is an approximation of an answer to this dilemma is just that, life.
67
How can a person really live with death looming over everything at the end of every day?
68
Many philosophers and authors have discussed this question.
69
Unlike their conversations of death, their conversations of life in the face of death can provide some earnest direction.
70
In 1879, Leo Tolstoy had published War and Peace as well as Anna Karenina.
71
He had earned his place among world literature, hailed as a genius.
72
After being born into wealth, Tolstoy had become famous for doing what he loved the most, and yet he felt entirely unfulfilled.
73
The promise of achievement had been broken.
74
Tolstoy was spiritually, emotionally lost, despite a life that should have produced the opposite.
75
It was in this state that he wrote the Confession.
76
This roughly 100-page essay outlined his quest to find the meaning of life, and specifically the deep depression that he fell into upon concluding that life was meaningless.
77
Discusses melancholy, suicide, depression, and misery.
78
It is one of the most heartbreaking, arresting essays ever put to paper.
79
And in these pages, I have found my only comfort.
80
Tolstoy begins with his decreasing interest and belief in religion.
81
He says that he only believed in God because his elders had instructed him to, and even then, the belief had been shaky.
82
Throughout Tolstoy's early years, perhaps his truer religion had been art.
83
He sought fulfillment in his art, poetry, writing, and in the circles of geniuses that he associated with.
84
Tolstoy had once held a great faith in the arts, but it was one that began to wane.
85
The people in his circle, including himself, were paid and praised highly for their work.
86
The public said they were arbiters of profound, ultimate truths, that these artists were enlightening the world.
87
The artists themselves believed it.
88
How could they not?
89
But Tolstoy eventually realized that for every great writer's idea, there would be another who wholly disagreed with it.
90
So he wondered how any of these people could really be arbiters of truth
91
if they themselves didn't even agree on this truth.
92
Tolstoy observed that his peers simply hung out with people who praised them and rejected those who didn't, so every artist believed themselves to be correct.
93
His faith in the arts as a driver of meaning crumbled.
94
Instead, he began to look at the concept of progress, live to make progress.
95
Within progress, one could find fulfillment, Tolstoy believed.
96
He would have a family, create a wondrous life, and just make progress.
97
But years into this, Tolstoy traveled to Paris.
98
There, he witnessed a public execution.
99
As the prisoner's head fell into its box, Tolstoy began to question this concept of progress.
100
This disillusionment continued with the death of Tolstoy's brother, Nikolai.
101
He was a kind and intelligent man when he fell ill in his mid-twenties.
102
Nikolai suffered for over a year, eventually succumbing to an agonizing death from consumption.
103
By Tolstoy's estimation, Nikolai never understood why he lived, why he suffered, nor why he died.
104
In the face of this reality, what good was progress?
105
But still clinging to this idea of progress, Tolstoy began to teach young peasants in Russia.
106
However, he quickly realized this was futile.
107
Tolstoy himself did not have what they needed to learn.
108
Whatever knowledge would have improved their lives, provided them fulfillment, Tolstoy himself could not identify and didn't even have.
109
So his teaching became an impossible task.
110
These experiences all crystallized in a deep, dark time of depression for Leo Tolstoy.
111
In confession, he says this about his pursuit of progress.
112
I still had not understood that in answering that one must live according to progress
113
was talking just like a person being carried along in a boat by the waves and the wind.
114
Such a person replies to the only important question, where do we steer by saying we are being carried somewhere?
115
Tolstoy had always thought the meaning of life and death would come to him, and he would find it eventually.
116
But now it became clear this wasn't going to happen.
117
These questions came up over and over in his mind.
118
In the confession, he compares them to tiny black points.
119
They were few and far between initially, but were coming together to form a single, unignorable, dark stain.
120
They were, he said, like an illness ignored by a patient.
121
The symptoms occurred with increasing frequency until they turned into one continuous duration of suffering.
122
Suddenly, the patient would discover the truth.
123
What was once a mild illness had now become death.
124
Tolstoy was a famous intellectual.
125
He had access to the greatest knowledge history had ever produced.
126
No library would refuse him entry.
127
He could sit down and have conversations with the wisest men in the world, and so he did.
128
But through all of this, Tolstoy found no answers.
129
He was instead overtaken with an intense depression.
130
His thoughts turned to suicide, and these suicidal ideations became as normal to him as self-preservation once had been.
131
To end his life, he felt as natural as eating or sleeping.
132
To prevent himself from taking his own life, Tolstoy removed all the ropes from his room.
133
He stopped hunting with a gun.
134
In the confession, Tolstoy likened this time to having climbed a mountain.
135
He was as successful as he could have ever been.
136
He had reached the summit, expecting a wondrous view.
137
Instead, he stood there like a fool, having found only an empty wasteland.
138
In time, Tolstoy found himself with a new conclusion.
139
Not that he didn't have the answers to life and death, but instead that these questions simply didn't have answers.
140
In the Confession, Tolstoy concludes that there are four ways to live a life, at least for a man in his class.
141
First was ignorance people for whatever reason had never been bothered by these questions.
142
Tolstoy's thoughts here were simple.
143
Once you start thinking about these things you can't unthink them.
144
There's no going back.
145
So there wasn't anything he could learn from the ignorant.
146
Second he said was Epicureanism.
147
He defines this idea as being aware of one's impending death and its consequences, but enjoying life anyways.
148
He points to the words of the biblical figure King Solomon, Do whatever you can do by the strength of your hand.
149
There is no work in the grave where you are going.
150
No reflection, no knowledge, no wisdom.
151
Tolstoy writes that most people employ this method, but he points to it as being inherently immoral.
152
He says that these people lead lives where they They experience more good things than bad, but through a moral stupidity, they forget that all of their advantages,
153
privileges, and allowances are pure luck, just happen to be born into a good situation.
154
He says that they forget not everyone can be a King Solomon with his palaces, his women, and his money.
155
For every palace, there are a thousand men who built it.
156
The same chance that turns a man into a Solomon one day can turn him into one of Solomon's slaves the next.
157
Tolstoy says that these people have a dullness of imagination that allows them to forget death, to forget that death will eventually just destroy the things they enjoy so much.
158
He claims Epicureans aren't really much different than the ignorant.
159
You see, once a person is illuminated to the moral problems with this lifestyle, there's again no going back.
160
So ultimately, Tolstoy finds no comfort in Epicureanism.
161
The third choice he proposes is suicide.
162
If you don't like a room, then leave, Tolstoy declares.
163
However, he says he is too emotionally weak to do this.
164
The final option is where I find comfort, and it seems Tolstoy found some version of comfort as well.
165
That option is simply to live.
166
To recognize that everything will be destroyed eventually and that you will die eventually, but to keep moving forward.
167
No matter how painful or inane or seemingly pointless death renders things to be, just keep living.
168
Now, Tolstoy wrote this essay in the midst of a profound depression.
169
And so he concludes that option four is wholly miserable.
170
However, I have to disagree.
171
I don't choose to disagree.
172
I have to.
173
I have no choice.
174
I have no interest in suicide.
175
I have no way of understanding death.
176
This question will be forever unanswered.
177
So all that I can do is find fulfillment in life and a meaningful connection to the act of living.
178
This house may be destroyed in time, but I must still live in it.
179
so I should make it nice.
180
And so when I torment myself with imaginations of death, I have to think about this.
181
I have to seek fulfillment in the mundane, in the everyday.
182
I cannot dwell on the future.
183
Friends, family, work, leisure, these are the things that make up my life, however futile they are when pitted against death.
184
Indeed, the alternative is horrific, to let death lead one's life entirely astray, to ignore the issues of death and to lead a wholly unexamined life.
185
This is an entirely different form of self-destruction.
186
Perhaps appropriately, this is a subject Tolstoy examined in other work.
187
The Death of Ivan Elych is a fantastic companion piece to the Confession, whether or not it was intended as such.
188
It tells the story of Ivan Elych, a court official who falls and injures himself while hanging curtains in his home.
189
The pain grows until a physician informs Ivan that the injury is terminal, and he will die.
190
The novella tells the story of Ivan's death.
191
In fact, it opens with his funeral.
192
From the first pages, the reader is assured that nothing will come save Ivan Ilyich, that the book does not end with some miracle.
193
Ivan Ilyich spent his life as basically a social climber and a careerist.
194
On his deathbed, he learns the consequences of this life.
195
As Ivan lies dying, he remembers a passage he studied in school.
196
Caius is a man.
197
All men are mortal.
198
Therefore, Caius is mortal.
199
Slowly, Ivan realizes that he has ignored death, and instead he has lived a profound lie, an existence with no examination of death.
200
Like a schoolchild who breaks down when faced with punishment, Ivan's lie also crumbles as death becomes imminent.
201
He's concealed death from himself, and thereby concealed life as well.
202
Ivan, in the early stages of his infliction, wants only to live how he used to, to go back to when things were pleasant before this whole mess.
203
So he begins to reflect on these pleasantries.
204
But as he lays in his bed dying, Ivan realizes they all feel quite different.
205
He says these pleasantries are melting into insignificance, all of them, except for the earliest recollections of his childhood.
206
Of course, it was during these years that Ivan was unaffected by formal ideas of pleasantness or societal expectations.
207
It occurs to Ivan that perhaps he did not live his life correctly.
208
But he asks, how can that be?
209
I did everything that was demanded of me.
210
And in this question, Ivan is presented with the truth.
211
He lived his entire life to fulfill the whims of others, in some cases in the micro sense, his employers or co-workers.
212
and others more grand, the expectations and ambitions that culture imposed on him, things that he fell for, wealth, status, adornment.
213
As early as his schooling days, Ivan says he committed acts that he found abhorrent that inspired in him a sense of self-hatred.
214
But by his colleagues, these acts were considered to be normal and admirable.
215
Eventually, Ivan himself became one of those colleagues.
216
These abhorrent acts likewise became normal and even aspirational by virtue of other people's expectations.
217
So his life met all of these expectations.
218
It earned him the approval and admiration of these people and institutions.
219
But Tolstoy writes that Ivan's chief agony, one that even the opium could not solve, was this feeling.
220
What if his whole life Ivan had not been doing the right thing?
221
Eventually Ivan cedes to this question and its inevitable answer.
222
Unfortunately, all of his decisions have already inflicted their damage.
223
On his deathbed, Ivan is truly alone, profoundly alone, in a way unbeholden to the physical presence of other humans.
224
Tolstoy writes that Ivan feels a loneliness among his acquaintances and family, people who he had believed to be his loved ones, but perhaps are not.
225
Ivan's loneliness, Tolstoy says, is fuller than any that can exist on earth, from the bottom of the sea or in the ground itself.
226
Ivan's death, because of the way he lived, becomes an experience of isolation.
227
and so at his deathbed he is surrounded only by the most shallow version of company.
228
In one passage, Ivan wants nothing more than to cry, to weep, and for someone to pity him as he lies in his excruciatingly painful death.
229
He wants someone to cry with him, to comfort him as if he were a child.
230
This is all that he wants with every fiber of his being.
231
And then would in come one of his colleagues, asking only for a ruling on a legal matter.
232
You see, all around him Ivan saw people who were lying.
233
They were basically pretending he wasn't actually dying.
234
Tolstoy writes, This lie all around him and inside him, more than anything, poisoned the last days of Ivan Ilich's life.
235
When death finally arrives for Ivan, he begs his family for forgiveness.
236
He cries and pleads.
237
Only in this does he then die in peace.
238
But Yvonne's funeral reveals the depravity of his life in one final and horrifically triumphant blow.
239
The attendees do not mourn or cry, but rather they express pure selfishness.
240
Some think of the promotions they may win now that he's died.
241
Others consider what amounts of money they could inherit.
242
Still more people seem entirely annoyed by the whole thing, annoyed by the tedium of the tasks they must now perform.
243
Broadly, these attendees are filled with a subdued joy, joy that it is Ivan who has died, not them.
244
The death of Ivan Ilyich tells us that a life poorly lived only serves to amplify the horrors of death, or perhaps create them entirely.
245
And so I believe the answer to death is not found in what happens after or during, or even why we all must die.
246
But instead, in how we live.
247
I was raised along with my sister by a single mother through early childhood.
248
She worked a lot as one must to support two children.
249
So my grandmother often took care of me in my mother's absence.
250
Most days after school, saw my grandmother, as did weekends and most of the summers.
251
2020, my grandmother had a stroke at the age of 93.
252
She went to the hospital, largely not herself, physically or mentally.
253
That night, she suffered another stroke and a heart attack.
254
Having signed a do-not-resuscitate order, my grandmother died that night in the hospital.
255
She was accompanied by her husband of some 70 years.
256
In my twenties, my relationship with my grandmother had deteriorated some just by virtue of distance.
257
I'd moved to a new city a thousand miles away, but we still spoke on the phone here and there.
258
The last thing my grandmother ever said to me was this.
259
People like to say life is short.
260
Don't listen to them.
261
Life is long.
262
I think death can be a lot of things.
263
It can be an enemy, a pair of shackles, a companion, or something else entirely.
264
My dread will never go away.
265
I'll never have answers to the question of death.
266
I will still lie in bed and think about dying, with regularity, likely for the rest of my life.
267
I dare not delude myself with ideas of legacy.
268
All people die.
269
Some just take longer.
270
But my hopes are twofold.
271
First, that I can be ready for death, somehow, when it comes.
272
And second, that in the meantime, I can live.
273
That I can find true joy in all that entails.
274
Indeed, I believe I have plenty of time to do so.
📺 Mesmo canal
✨ Vídeo recomendado
C136
66 frases
What science can’t answer, according to physicist Jim Al-Khalili | Big Think
IELTS PrepTOEFL Prep+2
C133
29 frases
Shakespeare: Hamlet
British Accent, en-GBIELTS Prep+4
C199
56 frases
It's way different than you think
IELTS PrepTOEFL Prep+2
C13
30 frases
Love, Loss and Symbolic Death
IELTS PrepTOEFL Prep+2
C12
530 frases
Human Immortality 4K | Can Science Defeat Aging?
IELTS PrepTOEFL Prep+2
C11
114 frases
There's a Giant Hole In Earth's History
IELTS PrepTOEFL Prep+2
C1526
14 frases
Tanya’s opinion on humans
IELTS PrepTOEFL Prep+2
C134
126 frases
The Egg - A Short Story
IELTS PrepTOEFL Prep+2
C12
30 frases
"I loved every minute of it, however hard it had been"
IELTS PrepTOEFL Prep+2
C14
89 frases
What is time?
IELTS PrepTOEFL Prep+2
C19
65 frases
Benedict Cumberbatch reads Kurt Vonnegut's letter to the future
IELTS PrepTOEFL Prep+2
B215
250 frases
The God of Horror
IELTS PrepTOEFL Prep+2
Sobre esta lição
Você está praticando inglês com "O, Death!" usando a técnica de Shadowing.
O que é a Técnica de Shadowing?
Shadowing é uma técnica de aprendizado de idiomas com base científica, originalmente desenvolvida para o treinamento de intérpretes profissionais. O método é simples, mas poderoso: você ouve áudio em inglês nativo e repete imediatamente em voz alta — como uma sombra seguindo o falante com 1-2 segundos de atraso. Pesquisas mostram melhora significativa na precisão da pronúncia, entonação, ritmo, sons conectados, compreensão auditiva e fluência na fala.