“I think a fair amount about the fact that we’re all going to die, ” Lena Dunham told the Guardian this past week. “It occurs to me at incredibly inopportune moments – I’ll be standing in a bar, having managed to get an attractive guy to laugh, and I’ll be laughing, too, and maybe dancing a little bit, and then everything goes slo-mo for a second and I’ll think: are these people aware that we’re all going to the same place in the end?”
Yes, Lena, birth is a death sentence. We’re all going to die, unless the universe changes radically. Is it unusual for younger people to consider their own demise? Not really. All humans are obsessed with these thoughts, in the following, endless cycle: Look at this person, I want to do him/her—Damn, I’m so biodegradable—When’s lunch?
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Dunham philosophizes like she invented thought: “I can slip back into conversation and tell myself that the flash of mortality awareness has enriched my experience, reminded me to just go for it in the giggling and hair-flipping and speaking-my-mind departments because… why the hell not? But occasionally the feeling stays with me, and it reminds me of being a child – feeling full of fear but lacking the language to calm yourself down. I guess, when it comes to death, none of us really has the words.”
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of Girls, and I admire and envy Dunham’s ability to expose her imperfect body with seeming ease. But do I really care how “special” this girl is? Do I care about her stormy, internal conflicts? Not really…
“I wish I could be one of those young people who seems totally unaware of the fact that her gleaming nubile body is, in fact, fallible, ” she says, noting: “But I am not one of those young people. I’ve been obsessed with death since I was born.”
OK, too much information. Take two Prozac and call me in the morning.
