I love libraries.
They are somewhat sterile areas – protecting the treasure of units contained therein. They are moving into an internet age, and yet house rare paper volumes.
I’ve been working on a research paper on Funerals. I believe that the rites and custom of funeral practice give us a good insight into our current and future society.
We tend to revere, or disregard, the body of the deceased.
We dispose of the body in sanitary ways (according to government regulation). We may have them buried, burned, chemically disintegrated, plasticized or used for anatomical study. We may not have a specific location in which the remains are placed. We may not visit gravesides. We may not even care to make “death commemoration” an ongoing practice.
All of this is undergirded by your philosophy of life – and death.
As a society turns more towards existentialism, secularism and individualism – an afterlife is disregarded. A body is just another mass of cells comprising an animal mass.
Or is it?