IX

IX

When one is young, one thinks of dying as a great yawning chasm that opens up beneath every day of one’s life. In my experience, it is a much different prospect.

Of course, there are days when death’s head hangs over your every thought like some great malignant cloud, staining the sun the black and green of corpse-flesh. But those days are the exception rather than the rule. Those days in which the sun shines bright, but you don’t feel its glow; those are the days which fill the last years, months, weeks of your time.

We are told that there is a season to all things; a time to grow, a time to die; a time to flower, a time to spread seeds; a time to sow, a time to reap. We are told that there is a time to all things, but can we say that there is such a time? Can we say that there is some divine weaver clothing our fate in rags or silks of doings and thinkings and goings? What if there is no person to cut the last thread of our existence? What if there is no fate to wear the clothes of our lives? What if we do and think and go and no one in the vastness of being pays the slightest heed? And if there is no one out there, does that mean that what we call a soul doesn’t exist? Or does it just mean that our soul is used up; drained away; freed from our mortal coil before we are freed ourselves? Or does it mean that it doesn’t matter what we do, we all go up to some heavenly aether, regardless of our doings and thinkings and goings? Or is there a vengeful god up in the sky to punish us when we break his laws and his edicts? Does it matter?