Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death--who was passing through one of those rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace, which is as different from what we call knowing it, as the vision of waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of the water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the commonplace 'We must all die' transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness 'I must die--and soon,' then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.
Those who think about death, carrying with them their existing ideas and emotions, usually assume that they will have, during their last hours, ideas and emotions of like vividness ... but they do not fully recognize the implication that the feeling faculty, too, is almost gone. The imagination, the state to be one in which they can have emotions such as they now have on contemplating the cessation of life. But at the last all the mental powers simultaneously ebb, as do the bodily powers, and with them goes the capacity for emotion in general. It is, indeed, possible that in its last stages consciousness is occupied by a not pleasurable sense of rest.
It seems a strange and repugnant conclusion that with the cessation of consciousness at death, there ceases to be any knowledge of having existed. With his last breath it becomes to each the same thing as though he had never lived. And then the consciousness itself -- what is it during the time that it continues? And what becomes of it when it ends? We can only infer that it is a specialized and individualized form of that Infinite and Eternal Energy which transcends both our knowledge and our imagination; and that at death its elements lapse into the Infinite and Eternal Energy whence they were derived.
When a house has just lost its soul, a stricken silence falls over the sudden emptiness that no one will fill again. And all the noises that may be made later in that house will be like a scandalous din, ugly echoes from one room to another, from one corridor to another, sharp and discordant as if the walls are no longer able to absorb any music once the source of harmony has been taken away. But this strange detail about the power of death can only be picked up by ears that are very attentive to the smallest murmurs of life. Rational people go through these empty spaces with the serenity of a lawyer, and their indulgent smiles categorize you if you decide to point out in their presence that there is something lacking in the atmosphere.
For death is but a passing phase of Life;
A change of dress, a disrobing;
A birth into the unborn again;
A commencing where we ended;
A starting where we stopped to rest;
A crossroad of Eternity;
A giving up of something, to unpossess all things.
The end of the unreal…and the beginning of the real.
How dreadful is the prospect of death, at the remotest distance! How the smallest apprehensions of it can pall the most cheerful, airy and brisk spirits! Even I, who thought I could have been merry in sight of my coffin, and drink a health with the sexton in my own grave, now tremble at the least envoy of the king of terrors. To see but the shaking of my glass makes me turn pale ... all the jollity of my humor and conversation is turned on a sudden into chagrin and melancholy, black as despair, and gloomy as the grave.
One regret dear world, that I am determined not to have when I am lying on my deathbed is that I did not kiss life enough.
I pass and leave life lying. No need for rhetoric, for funeral music, for melancholy bugle-calls. No need for tears now, no need for regret.
I took my risk with life; I die and give up life. I take life’s noble gift; salute for the last time those lines of pitiable crosses, those solitary mounds, those unknown graves, and turn to live our lives out as we may.
Which of us were fortunate -- who can tell? For you there is silence and cold twilight drooping in awful desolation over those motionless lands. For us sunlight and the sound of women's voices, song and hope and laughter, despair, gaiety, love -- life.
Lost terrible silent comrades, we, who might have died, salute life.
I think I should look forward to death more than I do. Of course everybody hates to go to bed or miss anything but dying is really the only chance we'll get to rest.
Once you accept your own death, all of a sudden you're free to live. You no longer care about your reputation. You no longer care except so far as your life can be used tactically to promote a cause you believe in.
'Cause I swear that I'm dying, slowly but its happening.”
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and bloody, reckless betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Why should you live, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with your inner self, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. Some work in offices. Some drive a car. Some picnic with their families. Some marry and raise children. Some don’t do any of this. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from hibernation-aka-existing.
And now the end is near
And so I face the final curtain,
My friends, I'll say it clear,
I'll state my case of which I'm certain.
I've lived a life that's full, I have not travelled each and every highway
And more, much more than this, I did it my way...
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is unreal! Life is frivolous!
And the grave is its goal;
Dust you art; to dust you return,
Was not spoken of the soul.
My life closed once before its close;
It yet remains to see
If immortality unveils
A second event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell or heaven…..who cares?
Death is a Dialogue between
The Spirit and the Dust.
"Dissolve" says Death.
The Spirit "Sir, I have another Trust"
Death doubts it—argues from the Ground
The Spirit turns away
Just laying off for evidence
With just an overcoat of clay.
