Funeral March

What does anyone do that can disturb or change the world? Isn’t there always, for every man of worth, another man just as worthy? One ordinary man is worth another; a man of action is worth the force he interprets; the man of thought is worth what he creates.

Whatever you’ve created for humanity is at the mercy of the Earth’s cooling down. Whatever you’ve left for posterity is so characteristic of you that no one else will understand it, or it belongs only to your age and won’t be understood by future ages, or it speaks to all ages but won’t be understood by the final abyss into which all ages will fall.

We are but windows, making gestures in the shadows, while behind us Mystery..... We are all mortal, with a given duration – never longer or shorter. Some die as soon as they die, while others live on for a time in the memory of those who knew and loved them; others survive in the memory of the nation that bore them; still others enter into the memory of the civilization they were part of; and some very few are able to span the contrary tendencies of differing civilizations. But all of us are surrounded by the abyss of time, in which we will ultimately vanish; the hunger of the abyss will swallow us all.....

Durability is just a wish, and eternity an illusion.

Death is what we are and what we live. We are born dead, we deadly exist, and we are already dead when we enter Death.

Whatever lives, lives because it changes; it changes because it passes; and, because it passes, it dies. Whatever lives is constantly transforming into something else – it continually denies itself, it perpetually evades life.

Life is thus an interval, a link, a relation, but a relation between what has passed and what will pass, a dead interval between Death and Death.

…intelligence, an errant fiction of the surface.

Material life is either pure dream or a mere ensemble of atoms, oblivious to our rational conclusions and our emotional motivations. And so the essence of life is an illusion, an appearance, which is either pure being or non-being, and the illusion or appearance that it’s nothing must belong to non-being – life is death. How vain is all our striving to create, under the spell of the illusion of not dying! ‘Eternal poem,’ we say, or ‘Words that will never die.’ But the material cooling down of earth will carry off not only the living who cover it, but also.....

A Homer or a Milton can do no more than a comet that strikes the earth.