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.
When buildings are torn down and rebuilt, the ghost of the old building is often visible in the new one — strangely angled walls and rooms, which make sense only in the context of the space as a living organism. On the web, there are no such restrictions: when a website dies, it leaves no sign of its past self behind.
He only who has lived with the beautiful can die beautifully. The last moments of the great tea masters were as full of exquisite refinement as had been their lives. Seeking always to be in harmony with the great rhythm of the universe, they were ever prepared to enter the unknown.
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Names of the Holocaust victims from Czech lands on the synagogue's inner wall.
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.
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.
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.
And if your broken heart's heavy when you step on the scale
You'll be lighter than air when they pull back the veil
Consider the flowers, they don't try to look right
They just open their petals and turn to the light
Ye! who behold perchance this simple urn,
Pass on, it honours none you wish to mourn.
To mark a friend's remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one — and here he lies.
There’s a standard way to understand the relative danger of any activity. A micromort is "a unit of risk defined as one-in-a-million chance of death." For example:
skydiving is 8 micromorts per jump
running a marathon: 26 micromorts
1 micromort: walking 17 miles, or driving 230 miles
Generally being alive averages out at 24 micromorts/day.
This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.