Despite the horror, we survivors were endowed with a will to survive. Or instinct. Or maybe it was faith.

Faith is one of only two things in mankind's consciousness that defies discussion. The other is one's marriage.

May your sleep be your death, and your wakefulness be your heaven.

If you cannot reach a state of utter oneness with each other, how do you expect to solve anything? Separate the world will crumble; together the world will thrive.

As survivors and procreators, we unravel stories that at their root are not dissimilar from the habitual behaviors seen in nature. But as beings who know they will die we digress into episodes and epics that are altogether dissociated from the natural world. We may isolate this awareness, distract ourselves from it, anchor our minds far from its shores, and sublimate it as a motif in our sagas. Yet at no time and in no place are we protected from being tapped on the shoulder and reminded, __ou__e going to die, you know._ However much we try to ignore it, our consciousness haunts us with this knowledge. Our heads were baptized in the font of death; they are doused with the horror of moribundity.

I was struck by an awful thought, the kind that cannot be taken back once it escapes into the open air of consciousness; it seemed to me that this was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die.