It has been argued that the love of knowledge is nothing more than a lifelong attempt to come to terms with the circumstances of mortality.  Because we have already defined love as a sacrifice, the love of knowledge, too, is a sacrifice of one thing for the other, a process of learning to become accustomed to the endings of things at the expense of experiencing them, a long labor of life to develop a noble and accepting disposition toward the inevitable and the unknowable.

Similarly mischaracterized is the nature of thrill-seeking. Frequently we describe the thrill-seeker's flirtation with danger as a life-giving impetus, that to willingly skirt the threshold of death is to invigorate oneself, to renew one's "thirst for life,"  to "feel alive." In this way, thrill seekers are characterized as virile forces representing as a whole the Western interpretation of the human endeavor: to be human is to transcend limitation, to confront, seemingly effortlessly, the otherworldly liminal space between life and death.

And yet human endeavoring can only carry human beings so far. There is a man on your back at the threshold and he can give you a little push into liminality. And like a tortoise in a shell of flesh you may emerge from the sheath of humanity as you free-fall, ten thousand feet, into the impossible space your body was never intended to occupy. In those moments, the sublunary world and your earthly memory tear away in the thunder of the descent, until there is nothing left of you but a ghost of your thought and the sensation of pleasure.

Of course, this is the critical moment of the thrill, because you must inevitably touch down. If you feel alive when there is nothing left of you, when you have cast off from every platform of reason and from every foundation upon which the knowledge of your life has been built, then you have accepted what is inversely proportional to the pleasure of your descent: that to be confined to the world in its mundanity is stifling, that the world beneath you is a tomb.