Has ever truly longed for death.
What you crave under the name of death is forgetfulness. You yourself compressed the whole truth into five words when you said: 'To live is to remember.' Your inference was that to die is to forget. It is memory that agonizes you; it is the past which lives in memory that handicaps you, that hangs like a mill-stone round your neck, and goads you to despair. If you could forget, if you could erase the entire past from your consciousness, you would cease to suffer. Is not that true?”
“True enough, perhaps. But without pertinence. A quibble. Forgetfulness is what I wish for, yes. But there is no forgetfulness except in death—no Lethe save the Styx.”
“No forgetfulness except in death? You assume, then, that there is forgetfulness in death; a bold assumption. Have you no dread of something after death, the undiscovered country? Do you ignore the possibility of a future life? Suppose, beyond the grave, you preserve your identity—that is to say, your memory: in what respect will you have gained by the change?”
“I must take my risks. This much I know for certain: there is no forgetfulness in life. In death there may be. I will take my chances. Am I not in hell now? Any change must be a change for the better. I will take the risks.”
“You say there is no forgetfulness in life. But suppose there were? Suppose it were possible for you to obtain total and permanent forgetfulness without dying, without taking those risks, without taking any risks at all? Suppose some one should come to you and say: 'See! I have it in my power to bestow upon you total and permanent obliviousness, so that the entire past, with all its events and circumstances, shall be perfectly effaced from your mind; so that you shall not even recall your name, nor your language; but, with unimpaired bodily health and mental capacities, shall begin life afresh, like the new-born infant, speechless, innocent, regenerated; another person, and yet the same:—suppose some one should come to you and offer that?”
“It is an idle supposition! The age of miracles has passed.”
“An idle supposition? You deem it such? Let us see, let us consider. To begin with, answer me this: Have you never heard or read—in conversation, newspaper, medical report, or novel—have you never heard or read, I say, of a case where, through an accident, a human being has had befall him exactly the experience which I have just described? A case where a lesion of the cerebral tissues, caused perhaps by disease, perhaps by a concussion of the brain, or by a fracture of the skull, has resulted in the total annihilation of memory, without injury to the other intellectual faculties, so that the patient, upon recovering health and consciousness, could remember absolutely nothing of the past—neither his name, nor his nationality, nor the face of his father or mother, nor even how to speak, walk, eat—but was literally born anew, and had to begin life over again from the start? Surely, everybody who has ears has heard, everybody who can read has read, of cases of that nature?”
“Oh, yes; I have read of such cases, certainly.”
“Very well. You have read of such cases. So!—Now, then, suppose an accident of that sort should befall you? Everything you can hope for from death would come to pass, and yet you would live. What better could you desire?