Death announcements on the walls are common everywhere in Italy, not just in Naples. They are a very effective way to let people know when and where the funeral is, better than obituaries in newspapers.
Try to imagine how would it be going to sleep forever. Try to imagine how would it be waking up without ever going to sleep. Spend some time in this with full attention, something might change in you.
Perhaps your perception of time ceases and therefore and eternity can pass in the blink of an eye. If the universe is in the long run cyclical then maybe the moment you die is the moment you wake up in another skull.
Of course, that idea makes a lot of big assumptions about the nature of consciousness that I have a hard time buying. It assumes our consciousness is akin to a singular entity, which I'm can't make sense of in either a materialistic framework of consciousness or a pan-psychic one.
The real answer to this depends on the nature of conscious awareness, and I haven't been able to find a single framework for how consciousness emerges that has even been internally consistent or fully explanatory, let alone one that has a lick of evidence in favor of it.
Even if we assume that death is a state of nothingness, I definitely find the popular idea that death feels akin to being basically trapped in a dark box for eternity to be nonsensical. We close our eyes and see darkness and so we assume that darkness is akin to nothingness, but in reality the perception of darkness & time is very much a something. To make an analogy, nothingness isn't what you see when you close your eyes but instead it is closer to what you can see right now out of your elbow or your foot. I think the same applies to our perception of time.
The most logical conclusion is of course that there is nothing, we mean nothing, have no soul in any way and our version of universe we have in our minds will simply cease to exist forever. Our dying is same as bacteria's dying, what kind of user experience do you expect for it afterwards?
But humans are anything but logical creatures, still rather primitive some would say (but we're trying!), so this isn't acceptable for many/most. Especially if one has been indoctrinated in one of many various religions du jour since birth, this idea becomes very hard to truly accept with all the consequences. Add high age and it becomes practically impossible.
Many people will mentally go to great lengths to avoid even considering this as a possible option. I don't blame them, for many life would lost any meaning (this I don't get, there is plenty of good regardless), and maybe adhering to morals of these days might be harder for them if there is no ultimate punishment. I personally find it liberating and am perfectly content with all aspects of this. Can't really explain rationally why though.
I expect it is similar to loss of consciousness from anesthetic, like propofol: a few seconds of fading awareness followed by nothingness. The difference is you don't wake up and marvel at not remembering anything while under the effect of anesthetic.
Just the other weekend I had a very weird sleeping/lucid dreaming experience that gave me a new perspective on death.
Someone in my house woke up around 6am and made some noise. Enough to wake me up. I quickly wrote it off as "not a danger" and went back to sleep. For some reason though, over the next 3 hours, I went in and out of sleep maybe 30 times. Each time entering a dream-state for a couple of minutes, dying, and re-awakening here. Then semi-consciously deciding to go back into another dream knowing that I would likely die back into this reality. Much like is shown in the movie Inception.
It gave me a strange new perspective on what happens after death - making it seem like a song I'd listened to too many times to care about anymore. Like, "Eh... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ been there, done that" (even if only in a dream).
Living life is more interesting to me than worrying about what happens in or after death.
I read the article, never found the bit about what Neapolitans understand about death better than most. If they're trying to say that Neapolitans understand better than most that death is always near, and is an integral part of the human experience, may I recommend travelling further afield and broadening one's experiences? Then you'd find that Neapolitans aren't overly special at all, and that the author is a little excitable.
And - besides - I know Neapolitans that are "normally" scared of death, some that are "terrified" by it and some that take it as a fact of life (if you prefer fatalistic).
Also what could she possibly have got of the (whatever particular) "essence" of Naples and of Neapolitans during a few days visit?
In the best case, this is an interview with Mimmo Borrelli :
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimmo_Borrelli
whose work actually often revolves around death and its significance but that is not in any way exclusively representative of Naples.
I am sorry, maybe I wasn't clear in my previous post.
The actual info in the article evidently largely comes from the encounter with Mimmo Borrelli and what he told her.
While it is unlikely (but possible) that the Author may have seen the 1984 movie by Luciano De Crescenzo she cites, it is almost impossible that she knows first hand about the works of Eduardo, and of course the Smorfia is only marginally connected to dead relatives and dreams.
The whole piece is IMHO yet another (poor) example of the typical stereotypical article by a foreigner (the twist is that the Author is for once not German or Anglo-Saxon, but Argentinian/Spanish and of Italina descent) that comes to Naples, stays there a few days, knows nothing of the city or of the people, finds something folkloristic talking to a single or a few sources and writes an article on the "curious" way Neapolitans think and live.
To be fair, she didn't actually mention the ubiquity of short, mustached, dark complexion men and checkered white/red tablecloths in restaurants, but she went very close to it.
The (italian) net is however full of interviews to Mimmo Borrelli, whom - for some reasons - appears to be very popular among the "intellighenzia", here is one, hagiographic as most if not all the other ones:
You're telling me you didn't routinely play with skulls as a child and sing songs with the Grim Reaper? Once again I am lead astray by an Argentinian Texan living in Barcelona who hung out in Naples for a few days! This happens way more than I'd like to admit.
The only particularity of Napoli might be the incredible depth of historical detritus that covers it and fills the caverns beneath the historic center. Death is ever present because dead things (and people) tend to hang around a long time.
I don't know where the habit comes from, but there just isn't the same kind of intense urge to clean and purify public space as in other European and western cities. But it's not that people aren't careful about cleanliness. Rather, that energy is spent inside the house.
Then there are the active volcanoes in, under, and around the city. Every day you see Vesuvius. And frequently, you think about the supervolcanic complex at Campi Flegrei, whose last major eruption is sometimes credited with wiping out a hominid subspecies. These really twist your perception of the future and the possibility of destruction. Maybe this effect has diminished because Vesuvius has been quiet, but it seems to rest on in the culture. I'd say this is much more important than any cave full of bones.
Okay, yep. But that merely places Neapolitan culture amongst many, many, others that incorporate an awareness of death into their lives.
For example, in my country, to the native Maori, their dead ancestors are directly present in their mihi (greetings), they carve them into the rafters of their marae (meeting houses) so they can sleep under the benevolent gaze of their hapu's predecessors, and most notably different to us Pakeha (European) Kiwi, they visit routinely with their deceased and lovingly maintain the graves in their urupa (graveyards) - far more so than Pakeha do.
And as for living with an awareness of impending death thanks to volcanoes, I grew up in the shadows of Mt Ngauruhoe (featured as Mt Doom in the LOTR movies), Mt Ruapehu and Mt Tongariro when I was growing up in the army base at Waiouru, after my Dad was posted to Burnham in the South Island, I had several years of nightmares of my family home being destroyed by lava. Even though Ngauruhoe was less eruptive than Ruapehu (which had killed significantly more people in historical times[1]) it had the classic conical stratovolcano shape, and in my youth was often emitting steam from the crater, which, to a 6 year old, implies eruptions and lava and tigers and bears oh my.
And then of course, after having been in the central business district during the Christchurch 2011 earthquake, and helping to rescue the injured (we had to ignore the dead despite the emotional impact of doing so, because well, if you're going to remove rubble from someone during continual aftershocks which could bring a building down on you, you're wanting to risk your life for someone who may live[2]) I continued to commute into the city afterwards despite the continual aftershocks and the fear we all shared.
I mean, I guess death didn't become a permanent part of our culture, but in my city, for at least six years or so, it was part of your life, your decision to go to work, you drove past the buildings where people had died, you walked past the corner where you tried to save a man and failed, on your way to team lunch.
But as a broad generalisation, Pakeha culture is all about burying or cremating the dead, mourning them, and then moving on. Yet my city, well, my city has only just moved on, and very many of us lived with the presence and potential of death for years.
So yeah, I struggle to understand why Naples allegedly has an insight deeper than most, and I'm tempted to make a sarcastic comment attributing it to the Camorra.
[1]https://www.nzonscreen.com/embed/5f8d20597c8f21e7 <- Film about the 1951 Tangiwai disaster, wherein a lahar destroyed a bridge shortly before a heavily laden express train crossed it. Tangiwai being the name of the river the lahar flowed down, and being the Maori for "Weeping waters" because cruel fate seems to enjoy apt names
[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veDBWTcd8jc The Indian man at 4:07 kindly gave up the back seat of his car (blocked in the middle of an intersection by fallen debris so not going anywhere fast) for me to place an injured woman we'd dug out while I checked her injuries - his son was terrified, fair enough, I smiled broadly and told him in my happiest voice that everything was going to fine, he gave me a very dubious "lol you're smoking crack mate" look, and I realised I was trying to reassure myself. Then the next aftershock came - we were lucky because it susurrated its way up Manchester St - the sound of screams and shaking trees moving toward us gave people sufficient time to move away from the rubble under buildings to avoid further falling masonry.
> there just isn't the same kind of intense urge to clean and purify public space as in other European and western cities
This is rather a gross romanticization of the situation. It's not at all that the exotic people of Naples are somehow essentially different and just don't feel a squeamish need to clean public spaces, as in other cities. Most Neapolitans strongly wish the city was much cleaner.
An ongoing dispute between the local government and organized crime has resulted in minimal trash collection since the 1980s, as part of efforts to pressure the city government.
I am from Naples, and we do have a bit of a thing for death, but I doubt the average Neapolitan knows any more than any other average citizen anywhere else.
I think people in Naples might, if anything, care and think less about death than your average person.
Neapolitan people, for better or for worse, tend to have a "day to day" attitude to life (which contributes to what makes the city a mess)
Doesn’t a mess come from mafia controlling dumpster companies or something like that? By the way, I love this place called pizzeria da Michele. Best pizza in the world.
There was a crisis in garbage collection a few years ago, but that seems to have been mostly resolved by political change (effectively, a socialist, progressive, anti-corruption mayor).
The problem that the previous poster is referring to is more that people just don't care a lot about things like dirty streets, pollution, noise, chaos, crowds, etc. They are actually super relaxed about things that would cause people in other places to throw fits. But this also contributes to a kind of decadence.
I meant more on an 'essential' level. We have the problems we have, including IMHO the corruption you mention, because (among other things) we tend not to think very much to the future.
To be fair, for Italians to get a driving license they need to go through a fairly intense driving school (much more intense than in the US). As such, you'll regularly see Italians drive in a "risky" manner because they know the other drivers on the road are more competent AND because their driving skills are actually better
This is related to the topic, but not this specific article. I used to have a really, really, really tough time with death. I spent far too much time thinking about it, trying to avoid it. There was a show on showtime called "Dead Like Me" (its available for free on prime). It had a profound effect on me, I don't obsess over death anymore and that is a gigantic relief. Hell, I only watched one season 10 years ago, but its stuck with me. I hope this helps anyone that has gone through something similar.
In both, visitors can see the skulls and bones of people who died in the 1600s—a century full of devastations, including the Black Plague and the eruption of the Vesuvius volcano—and didn’t receive a proper burial.
The Black Plague was in the mid-1300s. There was a bubonic plague outbreak there in the 1600s, though, which probably caused the confusion.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadAh, that's probably the greatest question of all time.
Of course, that idea makes a lot of big assumptions about the nature of consciousness that I have a hard time buying. It assumes our consciousness is akin to a singular entity, which I'm can't make sense of in either a materialistic framework of consciousness or a pan-psychic one.
The real answer to this depends on the nature of conscious awareness, and I haven't been able to find a single framework for how consciousness emerges that has even been internally consistent or fully explanatory, let alone one that has a lick of evidence in favor of it.
Even if we assume that death is a state of nothingness, I definitely find the popular idea that death feels akin to being basically trapped in a dark box for eternity to be nonsensical. We close our eyes and see darkness and so we assume that darkness is akin to nothingness, but in reality the perception of darkness & time is very much a something. To make an analogy, nothingness isn't what you see when you close your eyes but instead it is closer to what you can see right now out of your elbow or your foot. I think the same applies to our perception of time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20116147
But humans are anything but logical creatures, still rather primitive some would say (but we're trying!), so this isn't acceptable for many/most. Especially if one has been indoctrinated in one of many various religions du jour since birth, this idea becomes very hard to truly accept with all the consequences. Add high age and it becomes practically impossible.
Many people will mentally go to great lengths to avoid even considering this as a possible option. I don't blame them, for many life would lost any meaning (this I don't get, there is plenty of good regardless), and maybe adhering to morals of these days might be harder for them if there is no ultimate punishment. I personally find it liberating and am perfectly content with all aspects of this. Can't really explain rationally why though.
HN is the PERFECT PLACE for such questions.
I expect it is similar to loss of consciousness from anesthetic, like propofol: a few seconds of fading awareness followed by nothingness. The difference is you don't wake up and marvel at not remembering anything while under the effect of anesthetic.
Someone in my house woke up around 6am and made some noise. Enough to wake me up. I quickly wrote it off as "not a danger" and went back to sleep. For some reason though, over the next 3 hours, I went in and out of sleep maybe 30 times. Each time entering a dream-state for a couple of minutes, dying, and re-awakening here. Then semi-consciously deciding to go back into another dream knowing that I would likely die back into this reality. Much like is shown in the movie Inception.
It gave me a strange new perspective on what happens after death - making it seem like a song I'd listened to too many times to care about anymore. Like, "Eh... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ been there, done that" (even if only in a dream).
Living life is more interesting to me than worrying about what happens in or after death.
Also what could she possibly have got of the (whatever particular) "essence" of Naples and of Neapolitans during a few days visit?
In the best case, this is an interview with Mimmo Borrelli : https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimmo_Borrelli whose work actually often revolves around death and its significance but that is not in any way exclusively representative of Naples.
The actual info in the article evidently largely comes from the encounter with Mimmo Borrelli and what he told her.
While it is unlikely (but possible) that the Author may have seen the 1984 movie by Luciano De Crescenzo she cites, it is almost impossible that she knows first hand about the works of Eduardo, and of course the Smorfia is only marginally connected to dead relatives and dreams.
The whole piece is IMHO yet another (poor) example of the typical stereotypical article by a foreigner (the twist is that the Author is for once not German or Anglo-Saxon, but Argentinian/Spanish and of Italina descent) that comes to Naples, stays there a few days, knows nothing of the city or of the people, finds something folkloristic talking to a single or a few sources and writes an article on the "curious" way Neapolitans think and live.
To be fair, she didn't actually mention the ubiquity of short, mustached, dark complexion men and checkered white/red tablecloths in restaurants, but she went very close to it.
The (italian) net is however full of interviews to Mimmo Borrelli, whom - for some reasons - appears to be very popular among the "intellighenzia", here is one, hagiographic as most if not all the other ones:
http://www.quartaparetepress.it/2015/07/07/mimmo-borrelli-il...
I don't know where the habit comes from, but there just isn't the same kind of intense urge to clean and purify public space as in other European and western cities. But it's not that people aren't careful about cleanliness. Rather, that energy is spent inside the house.
Then there are the active volcanoes in, under, and around the city. Every day you see Vesuvius. And frequently, you think about the supervolcanic complex at Campi Flegrei, whose last major eruption is sometimes credited with wiping out a hominid subspecies. These really twist your perception of the future and the possibility of destruction. Maybe this effect has diminished because Vesuvius has been quiet, but it seems to rest on in the culture. I'd say this is much more important than any cave full of bones.
For example, in my country, to the native Maori, their dead ancestors are directly present in their mihi (greetings), they carve them into the rafters of their marae (meeting houses) so they can sleep under the benevolent gaze of their hapu's predecessors, and most notably different to us Pakeha (European) Kiwi, they visit routinely with their deceased and lovingly maintain the graves in their urupa (graveyards) - far more so than Pakeha do.
And as for living with an awareness of impending death thanks to volcanoes, I grew up in the shadows of Mt Ngauruhoe (featured as Mt Doom in the LOTR movies), Mt Ruapehu and Mt Tongariro when I was growing up in the army base at Waiouru, after my Dad was posted to Burnham in the South Island, I had several years of nightmares of my family home being destroyed by lava. Even though Ngauruhoe was less eruptive than Ruapehu (which had killed significantly more people in historical times[1]) it had the classic conical stratovolcano shape, and in my youth was often emitting steam from the crater, which, to a 6 year old, implies eruptions and lava and tigers and bears oh my.
And then of course, after having been in the central business district during the Christchurch 2011 earthquake, and helping to rescue the injured (we had to ignore the dead despite the emotional impact of doing so, because well, if you're going to remove rubble from someone during continual aftershocks which could bring a building down on you, you're wanting to risk your life for someone who may live[2]) I continued to commute into the city afterwards despite the continual aftershocks and the fear we all shared.
I mean, I guess death didn't become a permanent part of our culture, but in my city, for at least six years or so, it was part of your life, your decision to go to work, you drove past the buildings where people had died, you walked past the corner where you tried to save a man and failed, on your way to team lunch.
But as a broad generalisation, Pakeha culture is all about burying or cremating the dead, mourning them, and then moving on. Yet my city, well, my city has only just moved on, and very many of us lived with the presence and potential of death for years.
So yeah, I struggle to understand why Naples allegedly has an insight deeper than most, and I'm tempted to make a sarcastic comment attributing it to the Camorra.
[1]https://www.nzonscreen.com/embed/5f8d20597c8f21e7 <- Film about the 1951 Tangiwai disaster, wherein a lahar destroyed a bridge shortly before a heavily laden express train crossed it. Tangiwai being the name of the river the lahar flowed down, and being the Maori for "Weeping waters" because cruel fate seems to enjoy apt names
[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veDBWTcd8jc The Indian man at 4:07 kindly gave up the back seat of his car (blocked in the middle of an intersection by fallen debris so not going anywhere fast) for me to place an injured woman we'd dug out while I checked her injuries - his son was terrified, fair enough, I smiled broadly and told him in my happiest voice that everything was going to fine, he gave me a very dubious "lol you're smoking crack mate" look, and I realised I was trying to reassure myself. Then the next aftershock came - we were lucky because it susurrated its way up Manchester St - the sound of screams and shaking trees moving toward us gave people sufficient time to move away from the rubble under buildings to avoid further falling masonry.
This is rather a gross romanticization of the situation. It's not at all that the exotic people of Naples are somehow essentially different and just don't feel a squeamish need to clean public spaces, as in other cities. Most Neapolitans strongly wish the city was much cleaner.
An ongoing dispute between the local government and organized crime has resulted in minimal trash collection since the 1980s, as part of efforts to pressure the city government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naples_waste_management_crisis
I think people in Naples might, if anything, care and think less about death than your average person.
Neapolitan people, for better or for worse, tend to have a "day to day" attitude to life (which contributes to what makes the city a mess)
The problem that the previous poster is referring to is more that people just don't care a lot about things like dirty streets, pollution, noise, chaos, crowds, etc. They are actually super relaxed about things that would cause people in other places to throw fits. But this also contributes to a kind of decadence.
[0]: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27A_livella
The Black Plague was in the mid-1300s. There was a bubonic plague outbreak there in the 1600s, though, which probably caused the confusion.