Two Hundred and Forty Two

Why would anyone want to go on living in this hell?  Something is better than nothing, I suppose.  No, I don’t.  Not if it’s this thing. 

Suicide tempts those of us who think death would be an escape from a miserable life—and life is miserable for most of us most of the time.  The knowledge that we ourselves make it miserable makes it hell.  The few of us who fear death do so because they think it’s not the end of life.  Not only do they believe there will be an afterlife, but even worse, eternal life. 

Even the few of us whose lives are good would kill themselves if they could be sure their afterlives would be not only equally good, but better, because eternal—because although their own lives are good, they know life is miserable for most people most of the time, and the knowledge that we can’t help them makes life miserable for us as well.  Those whose lives are good want to escape hell in the next life just as they have in this.  We’d all kill ourselves if we knew what death is.

Is death the end?  We’ve always believed nothing is ever lost, but only undergoes a change.  It’s obvious that everything changes in this world of change, so I don’t know why evolution was ever considered controversial.  The only questions are how things change, and how much.

Westerners we call religious used to believe we leave the real world—the perfect, and therefore unchanging, world—to be born into this world of change, wander it a while and then return to the real world when we die.  Easterners we call religious used to believe the same.  The only difference is that they wander through several lives until they wean themselves from their desire for the illusions of this world as a baby weans itself from its mother’s milk, or an addict from his drug.

Most of us used to believe that throughout all these changes something remains the same—something we used to call the soul.  Others believe the change is complete, whether it's for better or worse.  Whether nothing of us that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea change

Into something rich and strange

Or great Cæsar, dead and turned to clay

Stops a hole to keep the wind away

the change is complete because nothing is eternal.  Perhaps not even that.