“The
Thought of Death. It gives me a melancholy happiness to live in the
midst of this confusion of streets, of necessities, of voices: how
much enjoyment, impatience and desire, how much thirsty life and
drunkenness of life comes to light here every moment! And yet it will
soon be so still for all these shouting, lively, life- loving people!
How everyone's shadow, his gloomy travelling companion stands behind
him! It is always as in the last moment before the departure of an
emigrant- ship: people have more than ever to say to one another, the
hour presses, the ocean with its lonely silence waits impatiently
behind all the noise-so greedy, so certain of its prey! And all, all,
suppose that the past has been nothing, or a small matter, that the
near future is everything: hence this haste, this crying, this
self-deafening and self-overreaching! Everyone wants to be foremost
in this future-and yet death and the stillness of death are the only
things certain and common to all in this future! How strange that
this sole thing that is certain and common to all, exercises almost
no influence on men, and that they are the furthest from regarding
themselves as the brotherhood of death! It makes me happy to see that
men do not want to think at all of the idea of death! I would fain do
something to make the idea of life to us to be more than friends in
the sense of that sublime possibility. And so we will believe in our
even a hundred times more worthy of their attention.”
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