"20 Death is in us and outside us; beside us in every room, in every street, in every field, in every car, in ever plane. Death is what we are not every moment that we are, and every moment that we are is the moment when the dice comes to rest. We are always playing Russian roulette.
21 Being dead is nothingness, not-being. When we die we constitute 'God.' Our relics, our monuments, the memories retained by those who survive us, these still exist; do not constitute 'God,' still constitute the process. But these relics are the fossilized traces of our having been, not our being. All the great religions try to make out that death is nothing. There is another life to come. But why only for humans? Or why only for humans and animals? Why not for inanimate things? When did it begin for humans? Before Peking man, or after?
22 As one social current has tried to hide death, to euphemize it out of existence, so another has thrust death forward as a chief element in entertainment: in the murder story, the war story, the spy story, the western. But increasingly, as our century grows old, these fictive deaths become more fictitious, and fulfill the function of concealed euphemism. The real death of a pet kitten affects a child far more deeply than the 'deaths' of all the television gangsters, cowboys and Red Indians.
23 By death we think characteristically of the disappearance of individuals; it does not console us to know that matter is not disappearing, but is simply being metamorphosed. We morn the individualizing form, not the generalized content. But everything we see is a metaphor of death. Every limit, every dimension, every end of every road, is a death. Even seeing is a death, for there is a point beyond which we cannot see, and our seeing dies; wherever our capacity ends, we die.
24 Time is the flesh and blood of death; death is not a skull, a skeleton, but a clock face, a sun hurtling through a sea of thin gas. A part of you has died since you began to read this sentence....The more absolute death seems, the more authentic life becomes.
-John Fowles, The Aristos
