Death
I was listening to the Teaching Company on the commute today and Prof. Peter Saccio made the point that you can tell a lot about a culture by its self-help books. The Victorians, having made a lot of money from the Industrial Revolution, were obsessed with class and so bought books dealing with etiquette and how to write letters...His [Saccio's] generation was into sex, so that begat a spate of books on achieving orgasm and the joy of sex. Our generation might be considered about money, how to make money in the stock market, how to get rich...Shakespeare's generation read books about death - how to die well. To them the most important moment of life was the moment of your death, for your eternity hinged upon it. Deaths in Shakespeare's time were public, not hidden in the hospital but at home with friends and family and neighbors. I fear that most self-help books concerning death for our generation deal with how to kill yourself.
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