Live Like You’Re Dying Essay

Clean, Cull, and Connect. In his short essay Live like youre dying, Chuck Palahniuk refers them as the Three Cs. After confirming that self-destruction is the only escape route, they ar the three final chores you must finish on your last lively week. Clean everything. Your bathroom, car, refrigerator, everything. Cull down your resources, donate and undo needless possessions, and get a good haircut. Connect to everyone youve ever known and say something nice, no matter how bad you hate them.Dont facial expression humiliated, youve got nonhing to lose except a few days of your life. Also, know that no one will remember you, know that the world will not change after you die. Know that you will not be missed. And after all of this, Palahniuk says you probably wont bother to kill yourself, since by then youll be surrounded by friends who recognize you as a decent and valuable friend. But there is more to the essay than explaining what the three Cs are. Both the title and content cl early spotlights devastation as a major concept of the essay, as most of Palahniuks writings are.Actually, Palahniuk touches on death so often that it seems he cannot go through a single essay without discussing about it. Also, from start to beginning, his sentences are written in such a clean-cut way that the reader almost feels suicidal. Do everything. Destroy it. Treat yourself. Your oven will be clean, your car vacuumed. Even in the merriest mind, one cannot help entirely be persuaded that the world will crumble when the essay ends. Why does Palahniuk do so? It seems odd and arduous for any writer to be so pestilent when he writes.Palahniuk was beleaguered by death all his life. In his mind, his happy family had already died when his parents divorced, leaving him and his three siblings to live with their grandparents. Later on, Palahniuk volunteered at a hospice as an escort, where he had to witness the death of a patient he had grown attached to (which lead him to stop volunteer working). And around 1999, Palahniuks father Fred Palahniuk was shot and dragged into a house which was put on fire. Palahniuk later on helped the decision of the killers death sentence, the ex-boyfriend of Fred Palahniuks girlfriend.Although death is a frequently visited topic for Palahniuk, he probably doesnt always write in such a deathly manner on purpose. But it is also not surprising that Palahniuk ends up writing about death every time. Palahniuks word cream during the essay is also different from the ordinary writer. Not only that most of them are short, hardly all of them are so-called easy words (perhaps procrastinate at the last paragraph is an exception). Of course, it comes from Palahniuks minimalistic writing philosophy, but anyone with internet connector to Wikipedia can figure that out.The question is, where does his writing philosophy come from? Palahniuk claims himself to be a romantic who expresses ideas that others do not believe in. It is only na tural that he holds different ideas from the ordinary man, regarding the unordinary world he grew up in. Therefore, readers of Palahniuk need to think twice about what he wrote to understand it. But complex words run away to have an accurate meaning to it, which doesnt leave any space to think again about what he was actually trying to say. This leaves Palahniuk no choice but to use more flexible, simpler and original words.Although it doesnt show in the essay Live like youre dying, an exception is when it comes to mechanics. For example, in his novel encounter Club, most of the processes in making plastic bombs or soap is described in an accurate manner. This is probably because Palahniuk used to work for Freightliner as a mechanic, but his tendency to describe mechanical processes accurately has less to do with his flow of words than we have interest to. As it has been clearly shown, Live like youre dying has a deep relation to Palahniuks background, almost as if the essay is a shadow of Palahniuk.Everything that Palahniuk has been through, and is going through, is spilled out and spread, conscious or unconscious, on the computer screen when he writes. He cant help it. And it would be nonsense to say that this only counts for Chuck Palahniuk every essay is a shadow of the author in some way or the other, a footprint of what he has been through. Theres a sort of syllogism going on here what youve one is what you are, what you are is what you write, so what youve done is what you write. If you disagreed, youd be challenging Socrates.