I read NYT obits once in awhile. Sometimes people you wish you had met turn up. Clifford Geertz, a Cultural Anthropologist died at 80 years old. A good, long, life, it seems.
I like this quote, it seems oh so true:
"Believing with Max Weber that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun..."
Yes, we are like the spider, spinning our own little worlds, and then we look around and try to derive meaning from the slender, near-invisible threads that surround us.
Is it a fool's game? Clifford concludes that antrhopology is "an excellent way, interesting, dismaying, useful and amusing, to expend a life."