A parcel has been sitting on my desk for a week. Inside it is ★ (Blackstar), the 2026 pressing, still wrapped in its mailing packaging. I have unwrapped and played every other record that has come through my door this year. This one I cannot touch.
Bowie recorded Blackstar knowing he was dying. He had months left and he spent them making an album, not hiding in a room waiting for the end. That is about as close to Stoic practice as it gets. Seneca wrote that we should treat each day as if it were the last piece of a life, not because it is morbid but because it focuses the mind on what actually matters. Bowie seems to have done exactly that. He did not stop working. He turned the fact of his own death into the most honest record of his career.
I know all of this. I have read about the making of the album, watched the video for Lazarus, the way the whole thing reads differently once you know what he knew. And still the parcel sits there unopened.
That is the part I find interesting, more than the record itself. I can admire a lesson completely and still fail to live by it. Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself constantly about facing death without flinching, which tells you he was writing to remind himself, not because he found it easy. If a Roman emperor needed daily reminders, I do not feel too bad about a bit of hesitation over a record sleeve.
Maybe the honest answer is that Blackstar is not really an album to me right now. It is a closer look at mortality than I am ready for this morning. The other records in my collection are music. This one is something closer to a letter, and letters from the dying are never easy to open, no matter what is printed on the cover.
I don’t think there is a neat conclusion here. Stoicism is not about forcing yourself to feel resolved when you are not. It is about being honest with what is actually happening, rather than performing the version of yourself who has it all figured out. So the parcel stays on the desk for now. I expect I will open it eventually, probably on a day when I am in the right frame of mind rather than pushing myself to prove a point.
The lesson Bowie left behind still stands regardless of when I get round to hearing it. Facing an ending does not have to mean retreating from it. It can mean making one last thing worth making. I just need a bit more time before I can sit with that lesson on record rather than just in my head.
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