A Little Pop Culture

I wanted to bring up a little section from my favorite book that I think definitely relates to Decartes. You don't need to know anything about the story to understand the conversation, but I decided I'll fill you on just two facts. The first speaker, Faxe, is a seer or prophet, who looks into the future to find answers for people. The second speaker is a man who seeks an answer.

"'The unknown,' said Faxe's soft voice in the forest, 'the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. ... But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.... Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable–the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?'

'That we shall die.'

'Yes. There's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer.... The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.'"

Anyway, I had marked this page weeks ago, and I was just flipping through and re-read it, and it made think about what we have been discussing in class recently. About reality being a dream or a collective dream, the existence of God, or the idea that thought proves the existence of the body/the self/ or whatever. I found it interesting that this conversation talks about the only certain thing being death, rather than the mind, because how could we realize how important the mind is if it doesn't have a limit, or an end? Or maybe it really can exist without the body, and therefore doesn't have an end. Hmm, before I started writing this I was thinking that this quote had confirmed some idea I had about all this, but now I either can't remember what that was, or it just doesn't make sense anymore. I think, therefore I exist... or I die, therefore I must have existed in the first place? I'm wondering what you guys think of this.