The End

To build one’s house is very much like making one’s will. When the time does arrive for building this house, it is not the mason’s nor the craftsman’s moment, but that moment in which every man makes one poem, at any rate, in his life. And so, in our towns and their outskirts, we have had during the last forty years not so much houses as poems, poems of an Indian summer, for a house is the crowning of a career.

Cherry blossoms are to be preferred not when they are at their fullest but afterward, when the air is thick with their falling petals and with the unavoidable reminder that they too have had their day and must rightly perish.

Immortality, in that it is considered at all, is to be found through nature’s way. The form is kept though the contents evaporate.

You are a little soul carrying a corpse around.

As Epictetus used to say.

I’m about fifty-fifty on believing in God. For most of my life, I’ve felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye.

I like to think that something survives after you die. It’s strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and that it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.

But on the other hand, perhaps it’s like an on-off switch. Click! And you’re gone.

…Maybe that’s why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.

At the end, which is when life is over, death removes all the clothing that differentiated them, and all are equal in the grave.

We do not so much fear the pains of dying, as feel affronted by the notion that anything in this world should be inevitable.

“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?”

The Mughuls of India developed a tradition where each ruler commissioned his own garden. Then, “At the owner’s death the pavilion, generally placed in the center of the site, became the mausoleum, and the whole complex passed into the care of holy men.”

The smallness of human life is graphically expressed in this graveyard, in the low stubs of the headstones dwarfed by the towering tree trunks. Perhaps unexpectedly, the effect of this monumental contrast of scales is a feeling of comfort — the secure tranquility of a final resting place overseen by these massive forms, whose benign nature seems to be underlined by the little wooden nesting box on the central tree.

He had the sensation of stepping into the dampness of a grave, and it was not much better because he had always known that the grave was there and waiting for him.

When you surround the enemy
Always allow them an escape route
They must see that there is
An alternative to death.

Problem

No people who turn their backs on death can be alive. The presence of the dead among the living will be a daily fact in any society which encourages its people to live.

Solution

Never build massive cemeteries. Instead, allocate pieces of land throughout the community as grave sites—corners of parks, sections of paths, gardens, beside gateways—where memorials to people who have died can be ritually placed with inscriptions and mementos which celebrate their live. Give each grave site an edge, a path, and a quiet corner where people can sit. By custom, this is hallowed ground.

What if I say I shall not wait?
What if I burst the fleshly gate
And pass, escaped, to thee?

The bustle in a house
The morning after death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon earth,—

The sweeping up the heart,
And putting love away
We shall not want to use again
Until eternity.

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

But I’m warning you,
this is my last existence.
Not as a swallow, not as a maple,
not as a cat-tail and not as a star.

Adell: I know as much as you do.

Lupov: Then you know everything’s got to run down someday.

During reconstruction in 1950–1954, the original floor-level as well as the appearance of the synagogue were restored. In following five years, the walls of the synagogue were covered with names of about 78,000 Bohemian and Moravian Jewish victims of Shoah. The names are arranged by communities where the victims came from and complemented with their birth and death date.

All earth was but one thought—and that was death.

They say that every time they go below they find something changed in the lower Eusapia; the dead make innovations in their city; not many, but surely the fruit of sober reflection, not passing whims. From one year to the next, they say, the Eusapia of the dead becomes unrecognizable. And the living, to keep up with them, also want to do everything that the hooded brothers tell them about the novelties of the dead. So the Eusapia of the living has taken to copying its underground copy.

They say that this has not just now begun to happen: actually it was the dead who built the upper Eusapia, in the image of their city. They say that in the twin cities there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead.

He thought that fear of death was perhaps the root of all art.

Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R.

Like thee, Man is in part divine,
A troubled stream from a pure source;
And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny;
His wretchedness, and his resistance,
And his sad unallied existence:
To which his Spirit may oppose
Itself—and equal to all woes,
And a firm will, and a deep sense,
Which even in torture can descry
Its own concenter’d recompense,
Triumphant where it dares defy,
And making Death a Victory.

The character of nature can’t arise without the presence and the consciousness of death.

When we make our own attempt to create nature in the world around us, and succeed, we cannot escape the fact that we are going to die. This quality, when it is reached, in human things, is always sad; it makes us sad; and we can even say that any place where a man tries to make the quality, and be like nature, cannot be true, unless we can feel the slight presence of this haunting sadness there, because we know at the same time we enjoy it, that it is going to pass.

Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it
My coming, my going
Two simple happenings
That got entangled

If I leave
no trace behind
in this fleeting world
what then could you
reproach?