At first glance it may seem puzzling that something as natural and universal as death should ever be a cause of worry to human beings. If we were purely biological entities then death would only be a continuation of what we intrinsically are. If we lived wholly on the plane of the organic, then, aside from an instinctual aversion to pain or predation, which is common to all animals and a condition of their own self-preservation, the necessity of our life's eventual termination would not trouble us, for we would be sustained by the spontaneous exuberance of living matter until its very end. But we live in a symbolic as well as a natural universe, and in this symbolic world our lives do not obey the laws of biology. We have projects and plans, dreams and aspirations. We attach ourselves to values and ideals, and we challenge, revise and improve them. As social and communicative beings we perform roles that connect us to the performers of other roles, as well as to previous generations who performed those roles, and to coming generations who we imagine will perform them in the future. We make and find ourselves represented in language, in art, in technology, in fashion, film and music, and when these symbolic forms are unsatisfactory – when we discover ourselves to be more singular or more profound than our cultural inheritance can articulate – we subvert, recreate and renew them. Our linguistic tools invite us to express, reason and justify that which does not coincide with what, according to nature, is and has to be. We measure and manipulate reality, and we create and imagine new realities. We secure the future with projects and promises, and we repudiate the past in acts of fantasy, crimes of betrayal, feats of heroism.