Near Death Experience Quotes

And I'm the kind of person who does not let inconsequential things like boys and near death experiences stop her.

Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.

He seemed very pleased with himself for surviving a near-death experience. I could practically hear him chanting to himself: I overcame. I conquered. I’m a man etc etc.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence: in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which i cannot touch because they are too near your slightest look easily will unclose me though i have closed myself as fingers, you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens (touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose or if your wish be to close me, i and my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly, as when the heart of this flower imagines the snow carefully everywhere descending; nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility: whose texture compels me with the colour of its countries, rendering death and forever with each breathing (i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens; only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses) nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Right now, a kiss is the going rate for near-death experiences. It's kind of a point system.

I tried to concentrate on the angel's voice instead. "Bella, please! Bella, listen to me, please, please, please, Bella, please!" he begged. Yes, I wanted to say. Anything. But I couldn't find my lips. "Carlisle!" the angel called, agony in his perfect voice. "Bella, Bella, no, oh please, no, no!" And the angel was sobbing tearless, broken sobs. The angel shouldn't weep, it was wrong. I tried to find him, to tell him everything was fine, but the water was so deep, it was pressing on me, and I couldn't breathe.

nobody can save you but yourself. you will be put again and again into nearly impossible situations. they will attempt again and again through subterfuge, guise and force to make you submit, quit and/or die quietly inside. nobody can save you but yourself and it will be easy enough to fail so very easily but don’t, don’t, don’t. just watch them. listen to them. do you want to be like that? a faceless, mindless, heartless being? do you want to experience death before death? nobody can save you but yourself and you’re worth saving. it’s a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it. think about it. think about saving your self.

I feel more like myself. That is all I need: to remember who I am. And I am someone who does not let inconsequential things like boys and near-death experiences stop her.

The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to God. Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

I was able to shake off the near-death experience, and whether it was true or not, I was able to use it as some sort of moral validation as to the importance of my existence, or at least the importance of me completing this job, because clearly God, the universe or whoever understood that there was no other human being alive on this earth stupid enough to take this job.

I believe that the greatest truths of the universe don't lie outside, in the study of the stars and the planets. They lie deep within us, in the magnificence of our heart, mind, and soul. Until we understand what is within, we can't understand what is without.

Morpheus places his hand on Jeb's busy fingers, eyes opened to slits. "Ah, my pretty pseudo elf." He takes labored breath. "is it time at last to express our unrequited feelings?

Near-death experiences release a lot of endorphins, resulting in a natural high," Tod whispered. "And it's totally true that one passion feeds another." "You know we're way past 'near-death', right?" "My endorphins aren't listening to you.

It’s called a near-death experience. You should try it sometime,” I said sweetly. “Maybe without the ‘near’.

And I am someone who does not let inconsequential boys and near-death experiences stop her.

I detach myself from preconceived outcomes and trust that all is well. Being myself allows the wholeness of my unique magnificience to draw me in those directions most beneficial to me and to all others. This is really the only thing I have to do. And within that framework, everything that is truly mine comes into my life effortlessly, in the most magical and unexpected ways imaginable, demonstrating every day the power and love of who I truly am.

I'm at my strongest when I'm able to let go, when I suspend my beliefs as well as disbeliefs, and leave myself open to all possibilities. That also seems to be when I'm able to experience the most internal clarity and synchronicities.

A VERY ACCURATE ONE. YOU SEE, YOU ARE HAVING A NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE, WHICH INESCAPABLY MEANS THAT I MUST UNDERGO A NEAR-VIMES EXPERIENCE. DON’T MIND ME. CARRY ON WITH WHATEVER YOU WERE DOING. I HAVE A BOOK.

Bulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn’t a country; it’s a near-death experience.

Our eternal spiritual self is more real than anything we perceive in this physical realm, and has a divine connection to the infinite love of the Creator.

Some friends are like sunny days, with false flames, oozing from afar, coming near without a dime.

Look. (Mark held up his hands for Nick’s inspection.) They’re all pruny and wet. I’ll never have my soft sweet hands again.” – Mark “You’re not right, are you?” – Nick “I know this clown. He keeps teasing me with these near death experiences. One day, I’m going to take his butt down even when I’m not supposed to. You can’t keep knocking on my door and then slamming it in my face. It’s just not right.” – Death

just had a near-death experience,” she said, “let me have my little moment.

Someone was trying to kill Lady Alexia Maccon. It was most inconvenient, as she was in a dreadful hurry. Given her previous familiarity with near-death experiences and their comparative frequency with regards to her good self, Alexia should probably have allowed extra time for such a predictable happenstance.

The thought that the Mayan culture managed to calculate the Earth’s passing through the plane of the Milky Way galaxy never failed to fascinate Chuck. It was December of 2012 that had marked the end of the Mayan calendar and also saw the Earth pass through that plane, the winter equinox of 2012, to be precise. Of course, that exact date had been disproved. The Mayans hadn’t accounted for leap year. How could an ancient culture have calculated such a complex 26,000 year celestial cycle yet not figure in leap year? Yet another puzzle. Maybe it was this rare event that accounted for the appearance of his comet. His comet. Maybe he could be the one to officially make the discovery.

An interesting note to this novel is the fact that not only are a number of the experiences related herein ones to which I am intimately familiar, one is particularly unusual. I wracked my brain for quite some time to come up with a suitable near-death experience to use in the opening scene. As it turns out I had an “AHA” moment, or more appropriately a “DUH” moment when it occurred to me that I had actually survived the perfect experience to use. As a result, the first scene and the near-death experience described here was drawn, almost in its entirety from my OWN life, and I still retain the scar. I guess sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction.

Thorne was flying, so it was a constant stream of near-death experiences. How’s emperor life?” “Oh, you know. Press conferences. Cabinet meetings. Adoring fans everywhere I go.” “So also a constant stream of near-death experiences?” “Pretty much.

You look tired." "Yeah," I agreed, and shrugged. "Near-death experiences do that to me . . .

Life is devastating, if only in its limited run; but it’s incredibly good, too.

Jeff: You know most people who've had near death experiances say they say a white light. What did you see? Akmed: I saw flying car parts! Jeff: What was the last thing that went through your mind? Akmed: My ass. But I saw a blue Prius! Is it true you have one of those? Did you know that if your driving down the highway in a Prius and you stick your hand out the window the car will turn?!

It’s permanence that distinguishes grief from other emotional pain. The unfixable nature of never—that’s what makes it so terrible to bear.

It takes guts to stop fretting about the unknown and concentrate on the present moment.

I have them a few minutes to absorb everything while I teased Ubie, who only had to recover from his near-death experience. I was so glad Reyes hadn't ripped him to shreds. I liked him much better un-shredded. Unlike, say, my preference for lettuce or heavy metal guitar solos.

Soon, I found myself locked in my own cage of fear and desperation, where my experience of life was getting smaller and smaller.

There was nothing I could do to change what had happened, but I could not stop myself from desperately wishing I could rewind my life and do it all over in a way that was the exact opposite of my past.

Beauty is a nonviolent experience of near death, a warning that one is fragile, like everything else in the universe.

Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us, it seeps into us with every experience of the flesh and of life and, like the web of a great Spider, binds us subtly to what is near, ensnares us in a fragile cradle of slow death, where we lie rocking in the wind.

O perpetual revolution of configured stars, o perpetual recurrence of determined seasons, o world of spring and autumn, birth and dying! The endless cycle of idea and action, endless invention, endless experiment, brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; knowledge of speech, but not of silence; knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, all our ignorance brings us nearer to death, but nearness to death no nearer to God. Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

Don’t yell at me when I just survived a near-death experience. (Abbie)

Unworthy as I am, he allowed me to go to heaven, and I know the next time I go there, I’ll stay.

You’re much nicer after you’ve had a near-death experience. You should almost die more often.

The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed. And yet the heat that springs from the constant danger, from a lifestyle of near-death experience, is thrilling.

…depressive realism. Depression is not the near death experience described by so many, [Kayla Dunn] suggests, but a rebirth in which the new psyche has removed self-delusion. Compared with so-called healthy individuals, depressives are more realistic in their worldview.

in order to function, most people have to ignore reality, or at least most of it.

I really should talk to him. He's had a near-death experience!” "We all have. It's called living." (Hogfather)

One of the seats of emotion and memory in the brain is the amygdala, he explained. When something threatens your life, this area seems to kick into overdrive, recording every last detail of the experience. The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last. "This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older," Eagleman said--why childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while we’re dozing. The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.

Angels are all around us when we need them the most, and when we just need a nudge or two.

I don’t know much about the religions, but I know this: God looks at our love.

Non vanno mai via davvero.

Trust me.” A dangerous request. Trusting Red usually resulted in a near-death experience.

Obituaries are like near-death experiences for cowards.

I sucked a huge breath of air into my collapsed lungs. Once I could breathe again, I examined Ren’s back. His white shirt was dirty and torn, and his skin was scratched and bleeding in several places. I took a wet shirt from the bag to clean his scratches, while removing little pieces of gravel embedded in his skin. When I was finished, I grabbed Ren around the waist in a fierce hug. He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me close. I whispered against his chest quietly but firmly, “Thank you. But don’t ever…ever…ever do that again!” He laughed. “If I get results like this, I surely will do it again.” “You will not!” Ren reluctantly let me go, and I began mumbling, complaining about tigers, men, and bugs. He seemed very pleased with himself for surviving a near-death experience. I could practically hear him chanting to himself: I overcame. I conquered. I’m a man, etc, etc. I smirked. men! No matter what century they’re from, they’re all the same.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel. If the people the writer is making talk of old masters; of music; of modern painting; of letters; or of science then they should talk of those subjects in the novel. If they do not talk of these subjects and the writer makes them talk of them he is a faker, and if he talks about them himself to show how much he knows then he is showing off. No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature. People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time. A good writer should know as near everything as possible. Naturally he will not. A great enough writer seems to be born with knowledge. But he really is not; he has only been born with the ability to learn in a quicker ratio to the passage of time than other men and without conscious application, and with an intelligence to accept or reject what is already presented as knowledge. There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave. Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

It was nearly winter. I had just seen a friend die, and was again beginning to take pleasure in my own existence. This friend, who thought of himself as the "first man to experience pain", had nevertheless tried up to the last moment to wish death away. I was thankful for all things and decreed: Enjoy yourself, take advantage of your days of good health.

Zach was sitting in the passenger seat, seemingly calm and happy and content with his place in the world. The git.

It takes guts to stop fretting about the unknown and concentrate on the present moment. That’s what matters, anyway.

On July 13, 1994, Lint had a near-death experience, followed immediately by death.

Each and every time I walked out into the dark, I only ever came part of the way back.

God suffers with us! That single statement can profoundly change how you view suffering.

I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the faces of a danger it is unable to comprehend.

In that nanosecond of enlightenment I knew that the human spirit survives the death of the physical body and I understood that my wandering soul needed to get back into its earthly habitat.

But here before me was a good man. It struck me that I had yet to hear him say a negative word about another person. Even if he was describing a terrible action, like his father’s inability to care for his family in the way that they needed, he spoke in terms of the event, rather than blaming the person. I loved people like this, and encountered so very few.

I have spent much of my life around death. I have sat with people as they died. I have listened to others relate near-death experiences. I have studied theology and am aware of what scriptures and religions say about life and death. And I have come to the conclusion that death is not to be feared. Moreover, when it is time for me to move out of this tenement in which I am housed, I intend to look forward to it joyfully.

By studying thousands of detailed accounts of NDErs, I found the evidence that led to this astounding conclusion: NDEs provide such powerful scientific evidence that it is reasonable to accept the existence of an afterlife.”18

All of life is a near-death experience.

Yet I’ve come to understand that the way I will truly honor my mother’s memory is not with a big act, but through my daily choices: to be compassionate with myself, even when my will is weak and my body fails me; to give myself freely to those I love, even when it means my heart may be broken; and to live fully and completely while I have the chance—just as my mother did.

I’m at my strongest when I’m able to let go, when I suspend my beliefs as well as disbeliefs, and leave myself open to all possibilities. That also seems to be when I’m able to experience the most internal clarity and synchronicities. My sense is that the very act of needing certainty is a hindrance to experiencing greater levels of awareness. In contrast, the process of letting go and releasing all attachment to any belief or outcome is cathartic and healing. The dichotomy is that for true healing to occur, I must let go of the need to be healed and just enjoy and trust in the ride that is life.

How was the flight?" Kai whispered, standing so close she imagined she could feel the vibrations of his heart in the air between them. "Oh, you know," Cinder murmured back. "Thorne was flying, so it was a constant stream of near-death experiences. How's emperor life?" "Oh, you know. Press conferences. Cabinet meetings. Adoring fans everywhere I go." "So also a constant stream of near-death experiences?" "Pretty much.

It is a time for quietness and prayer. Death is present with us every day of our lives, it behooves us to take note of its nearness, not as a threat, but as our common experience on the way to grace. There is no more to be said. It is better to accept the will of God, and be silent.

The greatest love we feel for children, a spouse, friends, or family on earth amounts to a teaspoon of love compared to the oceans we will experience together for eternity. The Old Testament prophets foretold it, Jesus demonstrated it, and those who have had a peek behind the veil consistently say the same thing—God is love, and Heaven will be the greatest reunion ever.

The part of my brain that was responsible for creating the world I lived and moved in and for taking the raw data that came in through my senses and fashioning it into a meaningful universe: that part of my brain was down, and out. And yet despite all of this, I had been alive, and aware, truly aware, in a universe characterized above all by love, consciousness, and reality. There was, for me, simply no arguing this fact. I knew it so completely that I ached.

Everything about Jesus is love. His love for you is so personal it seems as if it is only for you. You come to realize that He has cared for you forever and will continue to care for you forever. His love is alive. It is more than just a sense. You are becoming His love. You are His love. Jesus loves us completely.

I kept wanting to sit and rest, to curl up in a ball and think of nothing else. No, no, no. The light. I had to go toward the light. That almost made me laugh out loud. It was funny, really. Like I was someone having a near-death experience. Then I did laugh. This whole night had been full of near-death experiences.

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven, The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit. O perpetual revolution of configured stars, O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons, O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to GOD. Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

nobody but you nobody can save you but yourself. you will be put again and again into nearly impossible situations. they will attempt again and again through subterfuge, guise and force to make you submit, quit and /or die quietly inside. nobody can save you but yourself and it will be easy enough to fail so very easily but don’t, don’t, don’t. just watch them. listen to them. do you want to be like that? a faceless, mindless, heartless being? do you want to experience death before death? nobody can save you but yourself and you’re worth saving. it’s a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it. think about it. think about saving your self. your spiritual self. your gut self. your singing magical self and your beautiful self. save it. don’t join the dead-in-spirit. maintain your self with humor and grace and finally if necessary wager your self as you struggle, damn the odds, damn the price. only you can save your self. do it! do it! then you’ll know exactly what I am talking about.

The coma carried me into a world where time and space seemed to vanish; it was a dreamlike existence in which people, places, and situations shifted as quickly as thoughts. I had a profound sense of being at a crossroads, a turning point, somewhere between death and life...

The sentiment behind the golden rule is great (treating others the way we wish to be treated ourselves). But nowadays we don’t even treat ourselves very well! We knowingly consume things that are bad for us, continue working at jobs we hate, and don’t spend half as much time relaxing as we do stressing. Come to think of it, we ARE treating others the way we treat ourselves: poorly! We feed our children junk food, opt for cheap instead of quality even when it matters, rarely give anyone our undivided attention, and demand a lot more from others than what is reasonable or even possible. Let’s try something new: let’s treat everybody as if we just found out they’re about to die. Why? Because it seems that’s the ONLY time we slow down enough to get a new perspective on life—either then or when we have a near-death experience ourselves. Be gentle, patient, kind and understanding. We’re all headed in the same direction, so let’s start treating each other better along the way!

What seems most important is that Dostoevsky's near-death experience changed a typically vain and trendy young writer-a very talented writer, true, but still one whose basic concerns were for his own literary glory-into a person who believed deeply in moral/spiritual values...more, into someone who believed that a life lived without moral/spiritual values was not just incomplete but depraved.

...he wonders by what process virtually any discussion about the war seems to profane these ultimate matters of life and death. As if to talk of such things properly we need a mode of speech near the equal of prayer, otherwise just shut, shut your yap and sit on it, silence being truer to the experience than the star-spangled spasm, the bittersweet sob, the redeeming hug, or whatever this fucking closure is that everybody's always talking about. They want it to be easy and it's just not going to be.

In my hands is power. The power to hear or to destroy. To grant life or to cause death. I revere this gift, have honed it over time an art as magnificent and awesome as any painting in the Louvre. I an art, I am science. In all ways that matter, I am God. God must be ruthless and far-sighted. God studies his creations and selects. The best of these creations must be cherished, protected, sustained. Greatness rewards perfection. Yet even the flawed have purpose. A wise God experiment, considers, uses what comes into his hands and forges wonders. Yes, often without mercy, often with a violence the ordinary condemn. We who hold power cannot be detracted by the condemnations of the ordinary, by the petty and pitiful laws of simple man. They are blind, their minds are closed with fear-fear of pain, fear of death. They are too limited to comprehend that death can be conquered. I have nearly done so. If my work was discovered, they, with their foolish laws and attitudes, would damn me. When my work is complete, they will worship me.

Dr. Kevorkian has just unstrapped me from the gurney after yet another controlled near-death experience. I was lucky enough on this trip to interview none other than the late Adolf Hitler. I was gratified to learn that he now feels remorse for any actions of his, however indirectly, which might have had anything to do with the violent deaths suffered by thirty-five million people during World War II. He and his mistress Eva Braun, of course, were among those casualties, along with four million other Germans, six million Jews, eighteen million members of the Soviet Union, and so on. I paid my dues along with everybody else,” he said. It is his hope that a modest monument, possibly a stone cross, since he was a Christian, will be erected somewhere in his memory, possibly on the grounds of the United Nations headquarters in New York. It should be incised, he said, with his name and dates 1889-1945. Underneath should be a two-word sentence in German: “Entschuldigen Sie.” Roughly translated into English, this comes out, “I Beg Your Pardon,” or “Excuse Me.

The intimacy of love God has for us is hard to comprehend. The only comparison comes by analogy—the connection we feel with a best friend, the oneness we want with a spouse, our tender love and desire for our children—and yet there’s an intimacy that we seek with each other that always eludes us. We can never be as close, as intimate, or as one with another person as our souls crave. That’s because the oneness we crave will only be found when we are united by God with God. God likens it to his own marriage to all of us together.

I’d had more than my fair share of near-death experiences; it wasn’t something you ever really got used to. It seemed oddly inevitable, though, facing death again. Like I really was marked for disaster. I’d escaped time and time again, but it kept coming back for me. Still, this time was so different from the others. You could run from someone you feared, you could try to fight someone you hated. All my reactions were geared toward those kinds of killers—the monsters, the enemies. When you loved the one who was killing you, it left you no options. How could you run, how could you fight, when doing so would hurt that beloved one? If your life was all you had to give your beloved, how could you not give it? If it was someone you truly loved?

That I have experienced my share of traumatic experiences, have survived abuse of various kinds, have faced near death from accidental circumstance and from violence...is not a card to play in gamified social interaction or a weapon to wield in battles over prestige. It is not what gives me a special right to speak, to evaluate, or to decide for a group. It is a concrete, experiential manifestation of the vulnerability that connects me to most of the people on this earth. It comes between me and other people not as a wall, but as a bridge.

Why, for example, is it still acceptable to profess the philosophy of a Communist or, if not that, to at least admire the work of Marx? Why is it still acceptable to regard the Marxist doctrine as essentially accurate in its diagnosis of the hypothetical evils of the free-market, democratic West; to still consider that doctrine “progressive,” and fit for the compassionate and proper thinking person? Twenty-five million dead through internal repression in the Soviet Union. Sixty million dead in Mao’s China. The horrors of Cambodia’s Killing Fields, with their two million corpses. The barely animate body politic of Cuba, where people struggle even now to feed themselves. Venezuela, where it has now been made illegal to attribute a child’s death in hospital to starvation. No political experiment has ever been tried so widely, with so many disparate people, in so many different countries and failed so absolutely and so catastrophically. Is it mere ignorance that allows today’s Marxists to flaunt their continued allegiance – to present it as compassion and care? Or is it instead, envy of the successful, in near-infinite proportions? Or something akin to hatred for mankind itself? How much proof do we need?

His theory is that in order to function, most people have to ignore reality, or at least most of it. Otherwise, all of the horrible things in life—child slavery, acts of war, the pesticides jam-packed into every other bite of food you put in your mouth, knowing that you’re a day closer to dying when you open your eyes each morning—would be so overwhelming that no one would ever get out of bed. “But for you, Libby,” said Paul, “the whole world is filled with kittens and rainbows and happy endings. It’s very cute and probably helps you sleep at night.

It was almost a mystical experience. I do not know how else to put it. My mind outran time as he neared, and it was as though I had an eternity to ponder the approach of this man who was my brother. His garments were filthy, his face blackened, the stump of his right arm raised, gesturing anywhere. The great beast that he rode was striped, black and red, with a wild red mane and tail. But it really was a horse, and its eyes rolled and there was foam at its mouth and its breathing was painful to hear. I saw then that he wore his blade slung across his back, for its haft protruded high above his right shoulder. Still slowing, eyes fixed upon me, he departed the road, bearing slightly toward my left, jerked the reins once and released them, keeping control of the horse with his knees. His left hand went up in a salute-like movement that passed above his head and seized the hilt of his weapon. It came free without a sound, describing a beautiful arc above him and coming to rest in a lethal position out from his left shoulder and slanting back, like a single wing of dull steel with a minuscule line of edge that gleamed like a filament of mirror. The picture he presented was burned into my mind with a kind of magnificence, a certain splendor that was strangely moving. The blade was a long, scythe like affair that I had seen him use before. Only then we had stood as allies against a mutual foe I had begun to believe unbeatable. Benedict had proved otherwise that night. Now that I saw it raised against me I was overwhelmed with a sense of my own mortality, which I had never experienced before in this fashion. It was as though a layer had been stripped from the world and I had a sudden, full understanding of death itself.

What are the things that make adults depressed? The master list is too comprehensive to quantify (plane crashes, unemployment, killer bees, impotence, Stringer Bell's murder, gambling addictions, crib death, the music of Bon Iver, et al.) But whenever people talk about their personal bouts of depression in the abstract, there are two obstructions I hear more than any other. The possibility that one's life is not important, and the mundane predictability of day-to-day existence. Talk to a depressed person (particularly one who's nearing midlife), and one (or both) of these problems will inevitably be described. Since the end of World War II, every generation of American children has been endlessly conditioned to believe that their lives are supposed to be great -- a meaningful life is not just possible, but required. Part of the reason forward-thinking media networks like Twitter succeed is because people want to believe that every immaterial thing they do is pertinent by default; it's interesting because it happened to them, which translates as interesting to all. At the same time, we concede that a compelling life is supposed to be spontaneous and unpredictable-- any artistic depiction of someone who does the same thing every day portrays that character as tragically imprisoned (January Jones on Mad Men, Ron Livingston in Office Space, the lyrics to "Eleanor Rigby," all novels set in affluent suburbs, pretty much every project Sam Mendes has ever conceived, etc.) If you know exactly what's going to happen tomorrow, the voltage of that experience is immediately mitigated. Yet most lives are the same, 95 percent of the time. And most lives aren't extrinsically meaningful, unless you're delusionally self-absorbed or authentically Born Again. So here's where we find the creeping melancholy of modernity: The one thing all people are supposed to inherently deserve- a daily subsistence that's both meaningful and unpredictable-- tends to be an incredibly rare commodity. If it's not already there, we cannot manufacture it.

In Sarajevo in 1992, while being shown around the starved, bombarded city by the incomparable John Burns, I experienced four near misses in all, three of them in the course of one day. I certainly thought that the Bosnian cause was worth fighting for and worth defending, but I could not take myself seriously enough to imagine that my own demise would have forwarded the cause. (I also discovered that a famous jaunty Churchillism had its limits: the old war-lover wrote in one of his more youthful reminiscences that there is nothing so exhilarating as being shot at without result. In my case, the experience of a whirring, whizzing horror just missing my ear was indeed briefly exciting, but on reflection made me want above all to get to the airport. Catching the plane out with a whole skin is the best part by far.) Or suppose I had been hit by that mortar that burst with an awful shriek so near to me, and turned into a Catherine wheel of body-parts and (even worse) body-ingredients? Once again, I was moved above all not by the thought that my death would 'count,' but that it would not count in the least.

But as to the influence of the death of someone near on those he leaves behind, it has long seemed to me that this ought to be no other than a higher responsibility. Does the person who passes away not leave all the things he had begun in hundreds of ways to be continued by those who outlive him, if they had shared any kind of inner bond at all? In recent years I had to live through so many close experiences of death, but not one person has been taken from me without my having found the tasks around me increased. The weight of this unexplained and perhaps greatest event, which only due to a misunderstanding has gained the reputation of being arbitrary and cruel, presses us (I think increasingly) more evenly and more deeply into life and places the utmost obligations on our slowly growing strengths.

The place resembled a new model prison, or one that had achieved a provisional utopia after principled revolt, or maybe a homeless shelter for people with liberal arts degrees. The cages brought to mind those labs with their death-fuming vents near my college studio. These kids were part of some great experiment. It was maybe the same one in which I'd once been a subject. Unlike me, though, or the guinea pigs and hares, they were happy, or seemed happy, or were blogging about how they seemed happy.

The death rate in the week between Christmas, 1944, and New Year’s, 1945, increased in camp beyond all previous experience. In his opinion, the explanation for this increase did not lie in the harder working conditions or the deterioration of our food supplies or a change of weather or new epidemics. It was simply that the majority of the prisoners had lived in the naïve hope that they would be home again by Christmas. As the time drew near and there was no encouraging news, the prisoners lost courage and disappointment overcame them. This had a dangerous influence on their powers of resistance and a great number of them died. As we said before, any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal. Nietzsche’s words, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,” could be the guiding motto for all psychotherapeutic and psychohygienic efforts regarding prisoners.

Japan held some 132,000 POWs from America, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Holland, and Australia. Of those, nearly 36,000 died, more than one in every four.*1 Americans fared particularly badly; of the 34,648 Americans held by Japan, 12,935—more than 37 percent—died.*2 By comparison, only 1 percent of Americans held by the Nazis and Italians died. Japan murdered thousands of POWs on death marches, and worked thousands of others to death in slavery, including some 16,000 POWs who died alongside as many as 100,000 Asian laborers forced to build the Burma-Siam Railway. Thousands of other POWs were beaten, burned, stabbed, or clubbed to death, shot, beheaded, killed during medical experiments, or eaten alive in ritual acts of cannibalism. And as a result of being fed grossly inadequate and befouled food and water, thousands more died of starvation and easily preventable diseases. Of the 2,500 POWs at Borneo’s Sandakan camp, only 6, all escapees, made it to September 1945 alive. Left out of the numbing statistics are untold numbers of men who were captured and killed on the spot or dragged to places like Kwajalein, to be murdered without the world ever learning their fate.

This morning, thanks to a controlled near-death experience, I was lucky enough to meet, at the far end of the blue tunnel, a man named Salvatore Biagini. Last July 8th, Mr. Biagini, a retired construction worker, age seventy, suffered a fatal heart attack while rescuing his beloved schnauzer, Teddy, from an assault by an unrestrained pit bull named Chele, in Queens. The pit bull, with no previous record of violence against man or beast, jumped a four-foot fence in order to have at Teddy. Mr. Biagini, an unarmed man with a history of heart trouble, grabbed him, allowing the schnauzer to run away. So the pit bull bit Mr. Biagini in several places and then Mr. Biagini's heart quit beating, never to beat again. I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagini was philosophical. He said it sure as heck beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War.

But he still lingered, feeling the wind lift his hair and grateful for another minute of peace. He was grateful, too, that Kate Miskin could share it with him without the need to speak and without making him feel that her silence was a conscious discipline. He had chosen her because he needed a woman in his team and she was the best available. The choice had been partly rational, partly instinctive and he was beginning to realize just how well his instinct had served him. It would have been dishonest to say that there was no hint of sexuality between them. In his experience there nearly always was, however repudiated or unacknowledged, between any reasonable attractive heterosexual couple who worked together. He wouldn’t have chosen her if he had found her disturbingly attractive but the attraction was there and he wasn’t immune to it. But despite this pinprick of sexuality, perhaps because of it, he found her surprisingly restful to work with. She had an instinctive knowledge of what he wanted; she knew when to be silent; she wasn’t overly deferential. He suspected that with part of her mind, she saw his vulnerabilities more clearly, and understood him better and was more judgmental than were any of his male colleagues. { by Adam Dalgliesh, of his teammate Kate Miskin }

167 It’s one of those days when the monotony of everything oppresses me like being thrown into jail. The monotony of everything is merely the monotony of myself, however. Each face, even if seen just yesterday, is different today, because today isn’t yesterday. Each day is the day it is, and there was never another one like it in the world. Only our soul makes the identification – a genuinely felt but erroneous identification – by which everything becomes similar and simplified. The world is a set of distinct things with varied edges, but if we’re near-sighted, it’s a continual and indecipherable fog. I feel like fleeing. Like fleeing from what I know, fleeing from what’s mine, fleeing from what I love. I want to depart, not for impossible Indias or for the great islands south of everything, but for any place at all – village or wilderness – that isn’t this place. I want to stop seeing these unchanging faces, this routine, these days. I want to rest, far removed, from my inveterate feigning. I want to feel sleep come to me as life, not as rest. A cabin on the seashore or even a cave in a rocky mountainside could give me this, but my will, unfortunately, cannot. Slavery is the law of life, and it is the only law, for it must be observed: there is no revolt possible, no way to escape it. Some are born slaves, others become slaves, and still others are forced to accept slavery. Our faint-hearted love of freedom – which, if we had it, we would all reject, unable to get used to it – is proof of how ingrained our slavery is. I myself, having just said that I’d like a cabin or a cave where I could be free from the monotony of everything, which is the monotony of me – would I dare set out for this cabin or cave, knowing from experience that the monotony, since it stems from me, will always be with me? I myself, suffocating from where I am and because I am – where would I breathe easier, if the sickness is in my lungs rather than in the things that surround me? I myself, who long for pure sunlight and open country, for the ocean in plain view and the unbroken horizon – could I get used to my new bed, the food, not having to descend eight flights of stairs to the street, not entering the tobacco shop on the corner, not saying good-morning to the barber standing outside his shop? Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us, infiltrating our physical sensations and our feeling of life, and like spittle of the great Spider it subtly binds us to whatever is close, tucking us into a soft bed of slow death which is rocked by the wind. Everything is us, and we are everything, but what good is this, if everything is nothing? A ray of sunlight, a cloud whose shadow tells us it is passing, a breeze that rises, the silence that follows when it ceases, one or another face, a few voices, the incidental laughter of the girls who are talking, and then night with the meaningless, fractured hieroglyphs of the stars.

And you know, back on Earth, I had so many questions for God. “If I ever meet Him,” I’d say, “I’m going to ask Him how He could let someone molest me when I was a child. How could He abide brutality against children or the suffering of starving people or cruelty toward the weak?” . . . In His presence I absolutely understood that in every way God’s plan is perfect. Sheer, utter perfection. Does that mean I can now explain how a child being murdered fits into God’s plan? No. I understood it in heaven, but we aren’t meant to have that kind of understanding here on Earth. All I can tell you is that I know God’s plan is perfect. In His radiance, it all makes perfect, perfect sense. In this way all the questions I had for God were answered without me even having to ask them. And yet, standing in His glorious presence, filled with His infinite wisdom, there was still one question I felt compelled to ask. . . . But in fact it wasn’t really a question for God at all. It was a question for myself. . . . “Why didn’t I do more for You? Why didn’t I accomplish more in Your name? Why didn’t I talk more about You? Why didn’t I do what You asked me to do?” It’s not that I felt regret—regret is a negative emotion, and there is nothing negative in heaven—it’s that I loved God so immensely I felt like He deserved so much more from me.1

No, he would never know his father, who would continue to sleep over there, his face for ever lost in the ashes. There was a mystery about that man, a mystery he had wanted to penetrate. But after all there was only the mystery of poverty that creates beings without names and without a past, that sends them into the vast throng of the nameless dead who made the world while they themselves were destroyed for ever. For it was just that that his father had in common with the men of the Labrador. The Mahon people of the Sahel, the Alsatians on the high plateaus, with this immense island between sand and sea, which the enormous silence was now beginning to envelop: the silence of anonymity; it enveloped blood and courage and work and instinct, it was at once cruel and compassionate. And he who had wanted to escape from the country without name, from the crowd and from a family without a name, but in whom something had gone on craving darkness and anonymity - he too was a member of the tribe, marching blindly into the night near the old doctor who was panting at his right, listening to the gusts of music coming from the square, seeing once more the hard inscrutable faces of the Arabs around the bandstands, Veillard's laughter and his stubborn face - also seeing with a sweetness and a sorrow that wrung his heart the deathly look on his mother's face at the time of the bombing - wandering though the night of the years in the land of oblivion where each one is the first man, where he had to bring himself up, without a father, having never known those moments when a father would call his son, after waiting for him to reach the age of listening, to tell him the family's secret, or a sorrow of long ago, or the experience of his life, those moments when even the ridiculous and hateful Polonius all of a sudden becomes great when he is speaking to Laertes; and he was sixteen, then he was twenty, and no one had spoken to him, and he had to learn by himself, to grow alone, in fortitude, in strength, find his own morality and truth, at last to be born as a man and then to be born in a harder childbirth, which consists of being born in relation to others, to women, like all the men born in this country who, one by one, try to learn without roots and without faith, and today all of them are threatened with eternal anonymity and the loss of the only consecrated traces of their passage on this earth, the illegible slabs in the cemetery that the night has now covered over; they had to learn how to live in relation to others, to the immense host of the conquerors, now dispossessed, who had preceded them on this land and in whom they now had to recognise the brotherhood of race and destiny.

[from Some words about 'War and Peace'] For a historian considering the achievement of a certain aim, there are heroes; for the artist treating of a man's relation to all sides of life there cannot and should not be heroes, but there should be men. [...] The historian has to deal with the results of an event, the artist with the fact of the event. An historian in describing a battle says: 'The left flank of such and such an army was advanced to attack such and such a village and drove out the enemy, but was compelled to retire; then the cavalry, which was sent to attack, overthrew...' and so on. But these words have no meaning for the artist and do not actually touch on the event itself. Either from his own experience, or from the letters, memoirs, and accounts, the artist realizes a certain event to himself, and very often (to take the example of a battle) the deductions the historian permits himself to make as to the activity of such and such armies prove to be the very opposite of the artist's deductions. The difference of the results arrived at is also to be explained by the sources from which the two draw their information. For the historian (to keep to the case of a battle) the chief source is found in the reports of the commanding officers and the commander-in-chief. The artist can draw nothing from such sources; they tell him nothing and explain nothing to him. More than that: the artist turns away from them as he finds inevitable falsehood in them. To say nothing of the fact that after any battle the two sides nearly always describe it in quite contradictory ways, in every description of a battle there is a necessary lie, resulting from the need of describing in a few words the actions of thousands of men spread over several miles, and subject to most violent moral excitement under the influence of fear, shame and death.

But in the Petit Palais, which Daphne had not visited in thirty years, Roland had what she liked to call ‘a moment’. He retired early from the paintings and waited in the main hall. After she had joined him and they were walking away he let rip. He said that if he ever had to look at one more Madonna and Child, Crucifixion, Assumption, Annunciation and all the rest he would ‘throw up’. Historically, he announced, Christianity had been the cold dead hand on the European imagination. What a gift, that its tyranny had expired. What looked like piety was enforced conformity within a totalitarian mind-state. To question or defy it in the sixteenth century would have been to take your life in your hands. Like protesting against Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Soviet Union. It was not only science that Christianity had obstructed for fifty generations, it was nearly all of culture, nearly all of free expression and enquiry. It buried the open-minded philosophies of classical antiquity for an age, it sent thousands of brilliant minds down irrelevant rabbit holes of pettifogging theology. It had spread its so-called Word by horrific violence and it maintained itself by torture, persecution and death. Gentle Jesus, ha! Within the totality of human experience of the world there was an infinity of subject matter and yet all over Europe the big museums were stuffed with the same lurid trash. Worse than pop music. It was the Eurovision Song Contest in oils and gilt frames. Even as he spoke he was amazed by the strength of his feelings and the pleasure of release. He was talking – exploding – about something else. What a relief it was, he said as he began to cool down, to see a representation of a bourgeois interior, of a loaf of bread on a board beside a knife, of a couple skating on a frozen canal hand in hand, trying to seize a moment of fun ‘while the fucking priest wasn’t looking. Thank God for the Dutch!