Death is the dissolving of a partnership, the partners to which survive
and go elsewhere. It is the corruption or breaking up of that society
which we have called Ourself. The corporation is at an end, both its
soul and its body cease as a whole, but the immortal constituents do not
cease and never will. The souls of some men transmigrate in great part
into their children, but there is a large alloy in respect both of body
and mind through sexual generation; the souls of other men migrate into
books, pictures, music, or what not; and every one’s mind migrates
somewhere, whether remembered and admired or the reverse. The living
souls of Handel, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Giovanni Bellini and the other
great ones appear and speak to us in their works with less alloy than
they could ever speak through their children; but men’s bodies disappear
absolutely on death, except they be in some measure preserved in their
children and in so far as harmonics of all that has been remain.
On death we do not lose life, we only lose individuality; we live
henceforth in others not in ourselves. Our mistake has been in not
seeing that death is indeed, like birth, a salient feature in the history
of the individual, but one which wants exploding as the end of the
individual, no less than birth wanted exploding as his beginning.
Dying is only a mode of forgetting. We shall see this more easily if we
consider forgetting to be a mode of dying. So the ancients called their
River of Death, Lethe—the River of Forgetfulness. They ought also to
have called their River of Life, Mnemosyne—the River of Memory. We
should learn to tune death a good deal flatter than according to received
notions.