Perspectives on Death

"Our life is nothing but a single empty boat on a non-existent sea." ~Nakae Chomin

"Our way of life kept us rooted to the ground, and was not conducive to the search for transcendental truths. Whenever I talked of suicide, M. used to say: 'Why hurry? The end is the same everywhere, and here they even hasten it for you.' Death was so much more real, so much simpler than life, that we all involuntarily tried to prolong our earthly existence, even if only for a brief moment - just in case the next day brought relief! In war, in the camps and during periods of terror, people think much less about death (let alone suicide) than when they are living normal lives. Whenever at some point on earth mortal terror and the pressure of utterly insoluble problems are present in a particularly intense form, general questions about the nature of being recede into the background...In a strange way, despite the horror of it, this also gave a certain richness to our lives." ~Nadezhda Mandelstam

"I sought to teach men to live, he thought with bitterness, but what they seek is to transcend their death." ~Hannah Closs

"Having set the dogs on Achilles, she 'strikes her teeth into his white breast; she and her dogs - they on the right, she on the left; and... blood dripped from her mouth and hands.' Penthesilea's inadvertent passing from intended love kiss to an act of savage vampirism indicates the thin dividing line between the two impulses: "Did I kiss him to death?' she asks...'Did I not kiss him? Or did I tear him to pieces? If so it was a mistake; for kissing [Kusse] rhymes with biting [Bisse], and whoever loves with her whole heart might mistake one for the other." ~Gabriel Ronay

"Thanatos. Also, death instinct. One of the two primal instincts attributed to man, the other being Eros. The function of Thanatos is to restore higher organic organization to a simpler, pre-vital state. In this, Thanatos is expressing a tendency evident elsewhere in nature for organization to run down into greater simplicity. Thus this instinct tends to reinstate earlier levels of development by impelling the individual towards passivity, and to bring about the cessation of vital integrity in the organism through injury and destruction. Human life proceeds as a compromise between two primal instincts. The compromise is sometimes poorly made, with the result that human life and products are squandered and destroyed." ~Donald M. Kaplan and Armand Schwerner