The phenomenological or first-person premise is that, while all experience is mediated, immediacy precedes mediation. If everything that is prior is immediate, then how could anything other than the immediate gain a point of entry, how could any mediation come about? We would in that case be suffocated by immediacy. For experience to be possible the prior must include what is not immediate, as in the way that we respond before we have any notion of being in response to anything, in just the way we are responding now. Thus the immediate is already a mediation, and indeed we are content to imagine that what we come to recognise as our lives started long before we were born; it is only that we expect it to end purely and simply on our watch. The purpose of birth is therefore so that we can be entirely present at our death, even and especially if we don't mean to be. The reality is bound to be a disappointment, the trick seems to be to rehearse it as thoroughly as possible, to go through it before the point at which there is no-one left to go through anything.