ii
If a man know not life which he hath seen how shall he know death which he hath not seen?
iii
If a man has sent his teeth and his hair and perhaps two or three limbs to the grave before him, the presumption should be that, as he knows nothing further of these when they have once left him, so will he know nothing of the rest of him when it too is dead. The whole may surely be argued from the parts.
iv
To write about death is to write about that of which we have had little practical experience. We can write about conscious life, but we have no consciousness of the deaths we daily die. Besides, we cannot eat our cake and have it. We cannot have tabulæ rasæ and tabulæ scriptæ at the same time. We cannot be at once dead enough to be reasonably registered as such, and alive enough to be able to tell people all about it.
v
There will come a supreme moment in which there will be care neither for ourselves nor for others, but a complete abandon, a sans souci of unspeakable indifference, and this moment will never be taken from us; time cannot rob us of it but, as far as we are concerned, it will last for ever and ever without flying. So that, even for the most wretched and most guilty, there is a heaven at last where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt and where thieves do not break through nor steal. To himself every one is an immortal: he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.
vi
If life is an illusion, then so is death—the greatest of all illusions. If life must not be taken too seriously—then so neither must death.