Click here to continue to 4A Ready Writing Essay – 24

Topic I
“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.” 

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921

Topic II
“But in truth, the world is constantly shifting: shape and size, location in space. It’s got edges and chasms, too many to count. They open up, close, reappear somewhere else. Geologists nay have mapped out the planet’s tectonic plates — hidden shelves of rock that grind, one against the other, forming mountains, creating continents — but thy can’t plot the fault lines that run through our heads, divide out hearts.
The map of the world is always changing; sometimes it happens overnight. All it takes is the blink of an eye, the squeeze of a trigger, a sudden gust of wind. Wake up and your life is perched on a precipice; fall asleep, it swallows you whole.”

Anderson Cooper, Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival, 2006