This course will explore the range of meaning and experience conjured by the term “SURVIVAL” during our age of weapons of mass destruction, genocide, climate catastrophes, and extinction/s. The citations that follow begin to illustrate the range of discussion this course endeavors to evoke.
“A person cannot live without a steady faith in something indestructible within them, though both the faith and the indestructible thing may remain permanently concealed from them. One of the forms of this concealment is the belief in a personal god.” (Franz Kafka, The Zurau Aphorisms, 1931, #50)
“We are socially, metaphysically and historically located, but must transcend our locations. We must make judgments, but will be judged. We are never perfect, but we must be good. We are dying, almost already dead, but must live immortally. It’s enough to make your head explode.” (Hollis Huston, 1947 - 2018, Actor, Author, Unitarian Minister)
“Jews think: Empires, governments, nations come and go; the Jewish people remains. There is something grand and something ignoble in this passion; I think I don’t share it. But even I know that any real catastrophe in Israel would affect me more deeply than almost anything else.” (Hannah Arendt, Letter to Mary McCarthy, October 17, 1969)
“The Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have—or have not—inherited the earth.” (Elizabeth Kolbert, final sentence of her book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, 2014)
For writers like William James (1842 - 1910) mere survival is not enough; one must address questions like “What Makes a Life Worth Living?” In essential agreement with James, Albert Camus, writing in the aftermath of WWII, noted that “I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.”
While each of us, the living, has survived a personal as well as a shared past (awareness of which varies widely) only some of us actually bear witness to having experienced, investigated, undergone or endured war, illness, prison, homelessness, torture, mass shooting, slavery, death camp, nuclear bombing or other forms of living death. And most of us do not attend to the looming threats of personal death and mass extinction with the focus and intensity of figures like Elizabeth Kolbert or Bill McKibben.
This course explores modes and norms of living as if one were a survivor, that is, in intimate connection with mortal danger, pain and death, and the emotions these stir: anguish, terror, revulsion, despair, etc. on the one hand, and heightened appreciation of beauty, tenderness, kindness, love, and existence itself on the other.

Among authors to be referenced are:

• Margaret Atwood, Burning Questions


• Victor Brombert, Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi (2013)


• Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1955)


• Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (1976)


• Barbara Ehrenreich, Living With a Wild God (2014)


• Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction (2014)


• Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (1986)


• Robert Jay Lipton, The Future of Immortality (1987)


• Federico Garcia Lorca, In Search of Duende (1998, the centenary of author’s death)


• R. Nachman of Bratslav, “The Fixer”


• Felix Salten, The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest (2022)


• Adam Stern, Survival: A Theological Political Genealogy (2021)

COURSE FORMAT
This is an interactive online seminar course that meets weekly over 6 weeks. Live online sessions will use the zoom platform. Weekly reading or other forms of materials may be assigned. Weekly sessions will be recorded and available for registered participants to access throughout the course.
There are no papers or grades. This course does not offer any credits or certificates. This course is intended for learning for the love of learning.

COURSE MATERIALS
This course will have all reading materials supplied by the instructor
Registrants will receive access to the course website and the zoom links about two weeks before the course starts.

COURSE CANCELLATION POLICY
Registrants can cancel and receive a full refund up to March 3. After March 3, there will be no refunds issued.
Yale Alumni College courses are subject to schedule changes as well as cancellations. If Yale Alumni College must cancel any course prior to its start due to low enrollment, you will be notified of this by the cancellation date. Upon cancellation of a course, registrants may transfer their registration to another available course or have the registration fee fully refunded.

In the event of a disruption to the original course schedule, including but not limited to; Professor absence, hazardous weather conditions, or local travel restrictions, Yale Alumni College will do its best to reschedule the missed class for the week immediately following the original end date at the same course time and day.