mortality

I__ pretty sure Mom and Dad didn__ see me coming, either: the kid with the black moods, the kid whose mind was always elsewhere, flinching from real life as from a bruise. Who wanted to lay a fiction-filter on top of everything and pretend it was something else just to keep the sheer disappointment of it all bearable: this limited, empirical experience of ours, trapped inside a decaying shell of meat, mainly able to perceive that nothing lasts, even in our most pleasurable moments.

We know summer is the height of of being alive. We don't believe in God or the prospect of an afterlife mostly, so we know that we're only given eighty summers or so per lifetime, and each one has to be better then the last, has to encompass a trip to that arts center up at Bard, a seemingly mellow game of badminton over at some yahoo's Vermont cottage, and a cool, wet, slightly dangerous kayak trip down an unforgiving river. Otherwise, how would you know that you have lived your summertime best? What is you missed out on some morsel of shaded nirvana?

I was a couple of summers past twenty but I felt there were stones under that frozen, dun earth that were younger than me.

Wolf Winter,_ she said, her voice small. __ wanted to ask about it. You know, what it is.__e was silent for a long time. __t's the kind of winter that will remind us we are mortal,_ he said. __ortal and alone.

A shapeless figure bent over him, he smelt the fresh leather of the revolver belt; but what insignia did the figure wear on the sleeves and shoulder straps of its uniform__nd in whose name did it raise the dark pistol barrel?A second, smashing blow hit him on the ear. Then all became quiet. There was the sea again with its sounds. A wave slowly lifted him up. It came from afar and travelled sedately on, a shrug of eternity.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

The hospital room was as cold as dead skin, the hallway crowded with lost souls and reeking of illness.

Samuel Johnson placed this on his watch as a reminder near the end of his life; "The night cometh.

The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop, The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.

But to elude deathis not easy: attempt it who will,he shall go to the place prepared for eachof the sons of men, the soul-bearersdwelling on earth, ordained them by fate:laid fast in that bed, the body shall sleepwhen the feast is done.

The to-read pile is more than just a physical stack of books: it's a tower of ambitions failed, hopes unrealised, good intentions unfulfilled. Worse still, it's a cold hard reminder of mortality. Already, I have intentions to read more books than I can hope to manage in a normal lifetime. How will this pile of books taunt me when I'm 64?

An awareness of mortality is a heavy price to pay for sentience

life is a battle. it is a struggle renting us time against darkness. It's a fight it will never win. And still in fights. the Universe has no morality. It has no love, no patience. Those are the playthings of Humans..... the seeds of the end are in each beginning.

They are now informing me that not only are they better than the powerful, the masters of the world whose spittle they have to lick (not from fear, not at all from fear! but because God orders them to honour those in authority) _ not only are they better, but they have a __etter time_, or at least will have a better time one day. But enough! enough! I can__ bear it any longer. Bad air! Bad air! This workshop where ideals are fabricated _ it seems to me just to stink of lies.

Then I could not help wondering what the watching gods thought of us, with our clever masks and our jokes. What we think of crickets, perhaps, whose singing we hear with pleasure, though some of us smash them with our heels when they venture into sight.

Whatever condition we are in, we must always do what we want to do, and if we want to go on a journey, then we must do so and not worry about our condition, even if it's the worst possible condition, because, if it is, we're finished anyway, whether we go on the journey or not, and it's better to die having made the journey we're been longing for than to be stifled by our longing.

As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.

Maybe I'll have a tumour like his someday. At first it will be a small but growing sphere that will branch out, growing larger in my stomach like a fetus. I will probably feel it when it starts to take motion, moving inward with the fury of a sleepwalking child, traveling through my intestines blindly -