death & mortality16 quotes

“What does the desert mean? It means what it is. It is there, it will be there when we are gone. But for a while we living things—men, women, birds, that coyote howling far off on yonder stony ridge—we were a part of it all. That should be enough.”

“The Bushmen, who walk immense distances across the Kalahari, have no idea of the soul’s survival in another world. ‘When we die, we die, they say. The wind blows away our foot prints, and that is the end of us.’ Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians—with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds—project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.”

“Death, however, is the fundamental question of existence, primarily since existence is only meaningful because of its precariousness. If we take away the certitude of its ending, it loses its essential structure. Even our greatest joys, which we recognize as being moments of eternity, draw their grandeur from their comparison with the precariousness of everything. There is another reason that death is the fundamental question of existence: it is that man’s existence is always more limited than his thoughts, which very naturally strain against their limits, as they forever look beyond for an invisible horizon.”

“To pursue a life-work is to create order amidst the overall disorder of the world. It is a flower in the tumult, meaning in the midst of meaninglessness. Even if the work does not express anything great, it mysteriously bears witness to what man is. It is a sign of the depth of humanity and as such establishes a sure link with symbolic immortality. Through it, man defines himself as a being who can escape the chaos of contingency to dominate the passing of time, a being who resists the absurd by trying to shape scattered bits and pieces into a meaningful whole. In other words, he is a being who challenges the necessity of death, both hopelessly and with confidence. Since one day he must shuffle off the stage, he hopes to leave behind a sign of his presence, a minute yet significant trace: an existence with a name. The life-work is a reflection of its author and remains after him, as if the image lingered in the mirror after the person himself had left.”

“Carelessly we have abandoned the stabilizing values of our forebears, from the simplest traditions and values to the most complex strategies that survive over generations, since we believe we no longer need them. Enduring values that transcend the individual have been set aside, and at the center of the world we have placed the individual, around whom everything revolves and with whom everything ends. By giving the appearance of pushing back disease, famine, and war and leading longer lives in general, we believe in our own immortality during the best years of life. But that isn’t true, no matter how much we gloss over the decline of the body and banish the process of dying from our everyday lives and consciousness. The cathedrals of faith and prayer have been replaced with clinics of health and science. But clinics are not cathedrals. They can only treat physical ailments. We have replaced the spires of churches with towers of books in university libraries. But all this rational knowledge is not the same as wisdom.”

“The everyday worlds of our ancestors may have been smaller in terms of space and shorter in time, their horizons narrower than our own. Their lives could end at any moment. But these physical limits—the next hill and the edge of a great and dense forest, as well as death and dying—weren’t the same as real boundaries and the end of life. In terms of space and time their worlds reached much further than this. For they did not always have to keep their eyes on the ground or their gaze on the next mountain or the edge of the forest. They could also turn their gaze boldly (or perhaps anxiously) upward to the Sun and the Moon, the stars and the planets, the rain clouds and storms that were approaching. For present life in a peasant world, all of this was certainly of greater importance than the question of who lived on the other side of the next mountain or forest. Likewise, death and dying were accepted as a natural and understandable break, as a passage, but this in no way distracted the view of what was to come: continuation of life everlasting.”

“Were I to describe the blessings I desire in life, I would be happy in a few but faithful friends. Might I choose my talent, it should rather be good than laming. I would consult in the choice of my house, convenience rather than state; and, for my circumstances, desire a moderate but independent fortune. Business enough to secure me from indolence, and leisure enough always to have an hour to spare. I would have no master, and I desire few servants. 1 would not be led away by ambition, nor perplexed with disputes. I would enjoy the blessings of health but rather be beholden for it to a regular life and an easy mind, than to the school of Hippocrates. As to my passions, since we cannot be wholly divested of them, I would hate only those whose manners rendered them odious, and love only where I knew I ought. Thus would I pass cheerfully through that portion of my life which cannot last always, & with resignation wait for that which will last forever.”

“In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”

“As they say in South America, everyone knows that they are going to die; yet nobody believes it. Human lapses of this kind, enable us to fish, fornicate, overeat, and bet on the horses.”

“I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?”

“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

“Poetry, drama, portraiture and music show us that mortality is inextricably woven into the human scheme of things: that our virtues and our loves are the virtues and loves of dying creatures; that everything that leads us to cherish one another, to sacrifice ourselves, to make sublime and heroic gestures, is predicated on the assumption that we are vulnerable and transient, with only a fleeting claim on the things of this world.”

“A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of lifespan. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility, with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy, and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.”

“Can it be that we do not love to be reminded that we are very young and callow in a world that was old when we came into it? And could there be a strong resistance to the certainty that a living world will continue its stately way when we no longer inhabit it?”

“By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

“Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?

Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?

Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?

Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?

They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;

The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.

Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,

Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?”