Non-life

“ But death does not come at the bidding of the miserable. I had lately recovered from mortal illness, and my blood had never flowed with such an even current, nor had my limbs ever been so instinct with quick life, as now. I felt that my death must be voluntary. Yet what more natural than famine, as I watched in this chamber of mortality, placed in a world of the dead, beside the lost hope of my life? ”

“ Why is it that we shudder without a cause, and feel the warm life-blood stand still in its courses? Are the dead too near? Do unearthly wings touch us as they flit around? Has our soul any intercourse which the body shares not, though it feels, with the supernatural world—mysterious revealings—unimaginable communion—a language of dread and power, shaking to its centre the fleshly barrier that divides the spirit from its race? ”

“ May my God give me grace to prefer a hundred deaths to a life gained by the suffering of one simplest creature. He holds his life as I hold mine by finding himself there where I find myself. Shall I quiet my heart with the throbs of another heart? soothe my nerves with the agonized tension of a system? live a few days longer by a century of shrieking deaths? It were a hellish wrong, a selfish, hateful, violent injustice. ”

“ None but those who go behind the scenes of life, and are permitted to enter the prison-house of the human heart, can know how many are the terrible secrets which lie hid beneath the fair and even face of society, as we see it in the common intercourse of the world. With how many are their early days a struggle for life and death between principle and passion, the spirit and the flesh! With how many are those days spent in yielding and repenting, in reluctant indulgences, followed by agonies of remorse and shame! With how many does the conscience become callous, and vice a second nature! ”

“ Many motives impel me to beg earnestly for life. I feel the natural horror of a violent death, the universal dread of untimely dissolution. I am desirous to recompense the injury I have done to the clergy, to the world, and to religion, and to efface the scandal of my crime, by the example of my repentance: but, above all, I wish to die with thoughts more composed, and calmer preparation. ”

“ But to live,—to wear on, day after day, of mean, bitter, low, harassing servitude, every nerve dampened and depressed, every power of feeling gradually smothered,—this long and wasting heart-martyrdom, this slow, daily bleeding away of the inward life, drop by drop, hour after hour,—this is the true searching test of what there may be in man or woman. ”

“ Consequently, our paths do not meet; and I was wrong in sending you to mourn. They look on life as a huge tumour from which death sets them free. All the same they know not where they were before birth, nor where they will be after death. ”

“ Moreover, the possibility of a conscious existence beyond the shadow of death had been looming larger and larger for months past, and with that possibility other possibilities had come into view. What if the consequences of conduct followed men into the unseen? What if sin should separate a soul from the soul it loved? What if this life were a trust for which we should be held responsible? What if suicide should be as heinous a crime as murder? What if dying by one's own hand should stain the soul with deeper dishonour than any broken vow or unfulfilled promise? ”

“ If any one slips in crime, and then desponds amid the snares of death, will he not, invoking that name of life, regain the breath of life? In whom can hardness of heart, sloth, rancour, languishment stand before that name? ”

“ And our will-to-live contains a germ of suicide, and our survival-of-the-fittest the germ of degeneracy. As for the earth going round the sun: it goes round as the blood goes round my body, absolutely mysteriously, with the rapidity and hesitation of life. ”

“ "I have an odd paradox for you," he said. "Those who take lives will lose their own. Those who kill, will die. But he who gives his own life away will live again!" ”

“ And that is the foolishest thing in life!"
"Life is only suffering": so say others, and lie not. Then see to it that ye cease! See to it that the life ceaseth which is only suffering!
And let this be the teaching of your virtue: "Thou shalt slay thyself! Thou shalt steal away from thyself!"— "Lust is sin,"—so say some who preach death—"let us go apart and beget no children!"
"Giving birth is troublesome,"—say others—"why still give birth? One beareth only the unfortunate!" And they also are preachers of death. ”

“ That being, full of health and strength, moving, breathing, living, and which in another instant must cease to move, breathe, and live, surrounded by beings like himself, whom he never harmed, all of whom pity him, and none of whom can help him; that wretched being, dying, though not dead, bending alike beneath an earthly power and an invisible might; this life, which society could not give, but which it takes with all the pomp and ceremony of legal murder,—profoundly stir the popular imagination. ”

“ A life as cold and colorless and sad as death itself—to some of us far sadder—and yet you will not even let us die. Again we ask you, why? There is no place on earth for such as we, unless we will be criminals. ”

“ And this belief in a life beyond the grave, and pretended knowledge of its conditions—under one form or other one of the most ancient and widespread conceptions of the human race—what has it led to? Inhumanity in time past, inhumanity now; bloodshed and misery, dark delusion, degrading superstition, priestly pretence, persecution and intolerance, creed exclusiveness and bigoted zeal, misdirected fervour and visionary hopes—all the offspring of this conviction—fill the records of mankind. ”

“ Withdraw thyself often into the sanctuary of thy inmost consciousness; become once more point and atom, that so thou mayest free thyself from space, time, matter, temptation, dispersion, that thou mayest escape thy very organs themselves and thine own life. That is to say, die often, and examine thyself in the presence of this death, as a preparation for the last death. He who can without shuddering confront blindness, deafness, paralysis, disease, betrayal, poverty; he who can without terror appear before the sovereign justice, he alone can call himself prepared for partial or total death. ”

“ But when the scourge of deadly sickness has passed over the land, the effect has almost always been to slacken this tie; the inherent love of life, natural to human beings, turning to an almost incredible selfishness, and inducing men to abandon their nearest and dearest in the hour of peril, leaving them, if stricken, to die alone, or turning them, sick to death though they might be, away from their doors, to perish untended and without shelter. ”

“ If at the death of the body which sustains me, and which I call mine to distinguish it from the self that is I, my consciousness returns to the absolute unconsciousness from which it sprang, and if a like fate befalls all my brothers in humanity, then is our toil-worn human race nothing but a fatidical procession of phantoms, going from nothingness to nothingness, and humanitarianism the most inhuman thing known. ”

“ I have no desire to live; perhaps there never was a more willing victim dragged to the scaffold than I am. Why should I desire to live? A beggar, crippled, and with my health and spirit broken—why, oh why, should I desire to live? ”

“ Nay, to us it is conceivable that to some minds the deep pathos lying in the thought of human mortality—that we are here for a little while and then vanish away, that this earthly life is all that is given to our loved ones, and to our many suffering fellow-men, lies nearer the fountains of moral emotion than the conception of extended existence. ”

“ And because the whole difficulty for us is that the natural life has to be, in a sense, ‘killed’, He chose an earthly career which involved the killing of His human desires at every turn—poverty, misunderstanding from His own family, betrayal by one of His intimate friends, being jeered at and manhandled by the Police, and execution by torture. ”

“ And if a suffering friend said to me, "See, I shall soon die, only promise to die with me"—I might promise it, just as—to select for once bad examples for good reasons—the sight of a small, mountain people struggling for freedom, would bring me to the point of offering them my hand and my life. ”

“ In contradistinction to us, who the wiser we are the less we understand the meaning of life, and see some evil irony in the fact that we suffer and die, these folk live and suffer, and they approach death and suffering with tranquillity and in most cases gladly. In contrast to the fact that a tranquil death, a death without horror and despair, is a very rare exception in our circle, a troubled, rebellious, and unhappy death is the rarest exception among the people. ”

“ Suffering, struggle, work, and death are raised as objections against life, they make life questionable, unnatural—something that must cease, and for which one not only requires but also has—remedies! ”

“ For blood, in an evil sense denotes the extinction of life—in a natural sense the extinction of natural life, and in a spiritual sense, the extinction of spiritual life, the life of charity and faith. ”

“ and the more I live, the more I dread death, even while I abhor life. Such an enigma is man--born to perish--when he wars, as I do, against the established laws of his nature. ”

“ In life, our greatest preoccupation is death; is it not, then, curious to study the different ways by which the soul and body can part; and how, according to their different characters, temperaments, and even the different customs of their countries, individuals bear the transition from existence to annihilation! ”

“ By calling mortals to life, what a cruel and dangerous part has not the Deity forced them to act? Thrown into the world without their consent, provided with a temperament of which they are not masters, animated by passions and desires inherent in their nature, exposed to snares which they have not power to escape, hurried away by events which they could not foresee or prevent, unhappy mortals are compelled to run a career, which may lead them to punishments horrible in duration and violence. ”

“ To say that life then and there was insecure is to describe altogether too feebly a state of society and an environment wherein Death, in one violent form or another, was ever abroad, seldom long idle, always alert for victims. ”

“ Mortals regard the happy or unhappy events, health or sickness, life or death, plenty or want, as rewards or punishments for the right use or abuse of the liberty, with which they erroneously imagine themselves endowed. Do they reason in the same manner concerning the brutes? ”

“ Was not death infinitely more lovely and noble than such a life? A life of barren routine, without inner meaning, without any real significance. How sordid life was, how it was a terrible shame to the soul, to live now! How much cleaner and more dignified to be dead! ”

“ But the circumstances of their lives, with religion or superstition teaching them that fate predestines everything, and magnifying the most trivial occurrences into calamities from which there is no appeal, often surround their deaths with incidents so picturesque and quaint that they deceive the judgment, and exalt the paltry suicide into an heroic surrender of life. ”

“ If it be contended that he would, a constitution must then be attributed to him of which the human mind can form no conception. If it be admitted that he must have perished, temporal death can then no longer be attributed to the commission of moral evil, and it must be acknowledged as an essential property of our primary and physical organization; and that death is as natural as life in the order of the world. ”

“ If we were to live here always, with no other care than how to feed, clothe, and house ourselves, life would be a very sorry business. It is immeasurably heightened by the solemnity of death. ”

“ It is exactly among the naturists that the old instinct to kill begins to lose its force and that an instinct of helpfulness and real brotherhood soon takes its place. From another source, the instinct to kill dies out among the moralists and other people. And yet it is passing strange how this old survival—or is it a reversion?—holds its place amongst us, even in the higher levels. The punishment of a life for a life is itself a survival. ”

“ Yet birth, and lust, and illness, and death are changeless things, and when one of these harsh facts springs out upon a man at some sudden turn of the path of life, it dashes off for the moment his mask of civilization and gives a glimpse of the stranger and stronger face below. ”

“ And he will find presently that his assertion that human life is sacred must—if it is to mean anything—extend from the comparatively easy and simple problem of the death-penalty to those far greater problems, which lie all around him, of the cruel life-penalties tolerated or exacted by Society. ”

“ What a life, in the eyes of the flesh, is that of these unfortunate men, proscribed, persecuted, driven from their country, having only dens and caverns for their habitation, regarded every where as the horror of the universe ”

“ Is not the mighty mind, that son of heaven!
By tyrant life dethroned, imprison’d, pain’d?
By death enlarged, ennobled, deified? 457
Death but entombs the body; life the soul. ”

“ I neglected to fortify his mind against suicide by teaching him that it is not allowed to us to forestall the hour of our deliverance, and that those who endeavor to escape the trials of this life are punished by God either by separating them, if they expected to be united after death, or by condemning them to reincarnation on earth. ”

“ Suppose this awfully majestic form should call out to you, and say, ‘I ask you to give up health and drag yourself, not dead, but half alive, through a miserable existence for long years, until you perish and die in your crippled and hopeless condition. ”