Better words than mine

All the questions man asks about his life are multiplied by the fact
of death: for man differs from all other creatures, it would seem, in
being aware of his own death and in never being fully reconciled to
sharing the natural fate of all living organisms. The tree of
knowledge, with its apple that gave man awareness of good and evil,
also grew a more bitter fruit man wrenched from its branches: the
consciousness of the shortness of the individual life and the finality
of death. In his resistance to death man has often achieved a maximum
assertion of life: like a child at the sea's edge, working desperately
to build up the walls of his sand castle before the next wave breaks
over it, man has often made death the centre of his most valued
efforts, cutting temples out of the rock, heaping pyramids high above
the desert, transposing the mockeries of human power into visions of
godlike omnipotence, translating human beauty into everlasting stone,
human experience into printed words, and time itself, arrested in art,
into a simulacrum of eternity.

- Lewis Mumford (1944), The Condition of Man