Life & Mortality Quote by Norman Cousins

Cousins aims the word "tragedy" at a quieter catastrophe than illness or war: emotional atrophy disguised as normal adulthood. The line is built on a brutal inversion. We tend to fear death ending life; he fears life ending something essential inside us first. By stacking "the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response", he turns numbness into a series of small funerals, repeated until they feel ordinary. The real villain isn’t suffering, but the loss of the capacity to register it - in yourself and in others.

The subtext is moral and civic. "Awareness" here isn’t mindfulness as lifestyle upgrade; it’s the prerequisite for empathy, solidarity, even democracy. If you can’t feel "the pain or the glory of other men in yourself", you can still function, even succeed, but you’ll do it as a sealed unit, insulated from consequence. Cousins implies that society quietly rewards this insulation: professionalism, productivity, coolness under pressure. The cost is a flattened inner life that can’t be moved by art, grief, injustice, or joy.

Context matters: Cousins wrote in a 20th-century landscape shaped by mass violence, mass media, and mass institutions - environments that train people to cope by detaching. His phrasing has the cadence of a sermon, but the target is modernity’s most respectable vice: the gradual surrender of sensitivity. The warning lands because it refuses melodrama; it names the slow, invisible way a person can survive everything and still lose the point of being alive.