Dissolution
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.