i
The fear of death is instinctive because in so many past generations we
have feared it. But how did we come to know what death is so that we
should fear it? The answer is that we do not know what death is and that
this is why we fear it.
ii
If a man know not life which he hath seen how shall he know death which
he hath not seen?
iii
If a man has sent his teeth and his hair and perhaps two or three limbs
to the grave before him, the presumption should be that, as he knows
nothing further of these when they have once left him, so will he know
nothing of the rest of him when it too is dead. The whole may surely be
argued from the parts.
iv
To write about death is to write about that of which we have had little
practical experience. We can write about conscious life, but we have no
consciousness of the deaths we daily die. Besides, we cannot eat our
cake and have it. We cannot have _tabulæ rasæ_ and _tabulæ scriptæ_ at
the same time. We cannot be at once dead enough to be reasonably
registered as such, and alive enough to be able to tell people all about
it.
v
There will come a supreme moment in which there will be care neither for
ourselves nor for others, but a complete abandon, a _sans souci_ of
unspeakable indifference, and this moment will never be taken from us;
time cannot rob us of it but, as far as we are concerned, it will last
for ever and ever without flying. So that, even for the most wretched
and most guilty, there is a heaven at last where neither moth nor rust
doth corrupt and where thieves do not break through nor steal. To
himself every one is an immortal: he may know that he is going to die,
but he can never know that he is dead.
vi
If life is an illusion, then so is death—the greatest of all illusions.
If life must not be taken too seriously—then so neither must death.
vii
The dead are often just as living to us as the living are, only we cannot
get them to believe it. They can come to us, but till we die we cannot
go to them. To be dead is to be unable to understand that one is alive.