Ripe Death Quotes

Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.

Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all.

Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dimlit halls of other places forms that never were and never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who never saw what could have been. In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear, but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit—and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive. And there shall be in the planting in the shadows a grace and a mercy from which shall blossom dark flowers, and their teeth shall devour and sustain and herald the passing of an age. That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing. And then there shall be a fire that knows the naming of you, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you that remains.

Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near water, begin to rust. Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.

You look at me, you look at me closely, each time closer and then we play cyclops, we look at each other closer each time and our eyes grow, they grow closer, they overlap and the cyclops look at each other, breathing confusion, their mouths find each other and fight warmly, biting with their lips, resting their tongues lightly on their teeth, playing in their caverns where the heavy air comes and goes with the scent of an old perfume and silence. Then my hands want to hide in your hair, slowly stroke the depth of your hair while we kiss with mouths full of flowers or fish, of living movements, of dark fragrance. And if we bite each other, the pain is sweet, and if we drown in a short and terrible surge of breath, that instant death is beauty. And there is a single saliva and a single flavour of ripe fruit, and I can feel you shiver against me like a moon on the water.

Caves of blue. Strike the hue. Westward, burning. Pages turning. Indiana. Ripe banana. Happiness approaches. Serpents and roaches. There once was a god named Apollo Who plunged in a cave blue and hollow Upon a three-seater The bronze fire-eater Was forced death and madness to swallow

There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death -those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement- been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.

ASTONISHING, said Death. REALLY ASTONISHING. LET ME PUT FORWARD ANOTHER SUGGESTION: THAT YOU ARE NOTHING MORE THAN A LUCKY SPECIES OF APE THAT IS TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE COMPLEXITIES OF CREATION VIA A LANGUAGE THAT EVOLVED IN ORDER TO TELL ONE ANOTHER WHERE THE RIPE FRUIT WAS.

There are moments when a rope's end, a pole, the branch of the tree, is life itself, and it is a frightful thing to see a living being lose his hold upon it, and fall like a ripe fruit.

Are the angels of her bed the angels who come near me alone in mine? Are the green trees in her window the color is see in ripe plums? If she always sees backward and upside down without knowing it what chance do we have? I am haunted by the feeling that she is saying melting lords of death, avalanches, rivers and moments of passing through, And I am replying, "Yes, yes. Shoes and pudding.

Frost in January minus 20 for a week. Dead birds frozen on the branch—they fall with the first thaw like ripe fruit—death-ripened. We shall all end like them—just a stain in the snow.

Ahem! Ahem!” As I recalled, Aunt Kathy loved Uncle Dan so much, she went grocery shopping during his funeral and failed to attend his burial as well. Apparently, Ham Hocks, Collard greens, Chitlin, Fatback, and Hog-Head cheesetook higher priority over his Last Rites. Then the reverend proceeded cautiously as he introduced my mom. “Let metell y’all about my Ms. Liza. Sister Kathy kept this one close.” “Ahem! Ahem! Ar-choo! Ahem!” Shockingly, there was a lightening blast that rocked the building once again while dimming the lights for more than 10seconds. The crowd turned restless, took a deep breath, and then allowed Pastor Keith to resume. “I’m gonna tell y’all, they were two kernels on a cob. When you saw Sister Kathy, you saw Sister Liza. “Ahem! Ahem! Ahem!” “The two of them raised those boys from seeds to bean stalks. We helped nourish them right here in Zion Gate Union. Now they’re just ripe for the harvest. I hope some of you ladies can take a hint!” For a brief moment, modest laughter filled the church. Yet, it was needed because Pastor Keith had gone into uncharted waters. No one dared to challenge my mom. Yet, Pastor Keith was speaking glowingly about her. Only a fewwanted to see where the Reverend was going. But most didn’t care to re-open that door. Church members were so afraid of Mom, no one dared to call her by name. All parishioners would go mute and head the other way, or simply hit the exits just to avoid all encounters.

Consider the capacity of the human body for pleasure. Sometimes, it is pleasant to eat, to drink, to see, to touch, to smell, to hear, to make love. The mouth. The eyes. The fingertips, The nose. The ears. The genitals. Our voluptific faculties (if you will forgive me the coinage) are not exclusively concentrated here. The whole body is susceptible to pleasure, but in places there are wells from which it may be drawn up in greater quantity. But not inexhaustibly. How long is it possible to know pleasure? Rich Romans ate to satiety, and then purged their overburdened bellies and ate again. But they could not eat for ever. A rose is sweet, but the nose becomes habituated to its scent. And what of the most intense pleasures, the personality-annihilating ecstasies of sex? I am no longer a young man; even if I chose to discard my celibacy I would surely have lost my stamina, re-erecting in half-hours where once it was minutes. And yet if youth were restored to me fully, and I engaged again in what was once my greatest delight – to be fellated at stool by nymphet with mouth still blood-heavy from the necessary precautions – what then? What if my supply of anodontic premenstruals were never-ending, what then? Surely, in time, I should sicken of it. “Even if I were a woman, and could string orgasm on orgasm like beads on a necklace, in time I should sicken of it. Do you think Messalina, in that competition of hers with a courtesan, knew pleasure as much on the first occasion as the last? Impossible. “Yet consider. “Consider pain. “Give me a cubic centimeter of your flesh and I could give you pain that would swallow you as the ocean swallows a grain of salt. And you would always be ripe for it, from before the time of your birth to the moment of your death, we are always in season for the embrace of pain. To experience pain requires no intelligence, no maturity, no wisdom, no slow working of the hormones in the moist midnight of our innards. We are always ripe for it. All life is ripe for it. Always.

Do the thing you love to do. Hank Williams died at the ripe old age of twentynine. Stevie Ray Vaughan at thirty-five. Jesus at thirtythree. Don’t think you’re special and the Lord’s gonna bless you with time.

LET ME PUT FORWARD ANOTHER SUGGESTION: THAT YOU ARE NOTHING MORE THAN A LUCKY SPECIES OF APE THAT IS TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE COMPLEXITIES OF CREATION VIA A LANGUAGE THAT EVOLVED IN ORDER TO TELL ONE ANOTHER WHERE THE RIPE FRUIT WAS?

Just as apples when unripe are torn from trees, but when ripe and mellow drop down, so it is violence that takes life from young men, ripeness from old. This ripeness is so delightful to me that, as I approach nearer to death, I seem, as it were, to be sighting land, and to be coming to port at last after a long voyage.

For we die every day; oblivion thrives Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives, And our best yesterdays are now foul piles Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.

The ripe, the golden month has come again, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling. Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth turn home again... the fields are cut, the granaries are full, the bins are loaded to the brim with fatness, and from the cider-press the rich brown oozings of the York Imperials run. The bee bores to the belly of the grape, the fly gets old and fat and blue, he buzzes loud, crawls slow, creeps heavily to death on sill and ceiling, the sun goes down in blood and pollen across the bronzed and mown fields of the old October.

There is no task as urgent for us as to learn daily how to die, but our knowledge of death is not increased by the renunciation of life; only the ripe fruit of the here and now that has been seized and bitten will spread its indescribable taste in us.

She says, "But in contentment I still feel The need for imperishable bliss." Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires. Is there no change of death in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? or do the boughs Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, With rivers like our own that seek for seas They never find, the same receding shores That never touch with inarticulate pang?

Darling Eve!” The Irish was a bit more ripe in the voice, and no, the eyes not as stunningly blue. But Julian Cross hit the gorgeous mark, and moved well. In fact he moved straight to Eve, yanked her into a quick, hard kiss, with a hint of tongue. “Hey!” “I couldn’t help it.” The not-quite-blue-enough eyes twinkled at her. “I feel like we’re close.” “Think that again and they’ll have to write a fat lip into your next scene.” She caught Roarke, eyes narrowed, across the room. “And possibly a broken jaw.

The wedding was in Monterey, a sombre boding ceremony in a little Protestant chapel. The church had so often seen two ripe bodies die by the process of marriage that it seemed to celebrate a mystic double death with its ritual.

The erruption of feelings & emotions that follows a near-death exerience, or any event that causes us to stop & look deeply at the reality of our lives, is ripe with the potential for insight & clarity.

Brush snapped. The stag shambled forth from the outer darkness. It loomed above Scobie, its fur rank and steaming. Black blood oozed from gashes along its flanks. Beneath a great jagged crown of antlers its eyes were black, its teeth yellow and broken. Scobie fell to his knees, palms raised in supplication. The stag nuzzled his matted hair and its long tongue lapped at the muddy tears and the streaks of drying blood upon the man’s upturned face. Its muzzle unhinged. The teeth closed and there was a sound like a ripe cabbage cracking apart.

Many people wish for a different universe than the one in which we live. They want one where every day is harvest time and there are no long laborious summer months to go through in order to get there. And when the harvest is ripe and they are thriving, they want no approaching winters where they see that the harvest is over and a cold death is looming.

The seed of not being wanted, not being liked, not being appreciated is planted years if not decades before the ultimate moment. It is nourished by circumstances. It is watered with repeated negative criticism on their inadequacies. The seed sprouts in desperation, grows in dejection and blossoms into rage. The rage ripens to a poisoned fruit of not wanting to live anymore and one fine day, when it is ripe enough, it falls off.

I have died at the ripe age of twenty. Smile, for the world didn't get a chance to disappoint me. I have died at the mature age of ninety. Smile, for my life was more than satisfying. I have died suddenly—out of the blue. Smile, for I didn't have to fall ill before you. I have died from a long illness. Smile, for I had the chance to say goodbye. I did not want to leave this Earth. But smile, for I am still here among you. Why are you crying? Can you not see I am smiling?

Desire! It carries us and crucifies us, delivers us every new day to a battlefield where, on the eve, the battle was lost; but in sunlight does it not look like a territory ripe for conquest, a place where - even though tomorrow we will die - we can build empires doomed to fade to dust, as if the knowledge we have of their imminent fall had absolutely no effect on our eagerness to build them now? We are filled with the energy of constantly wanting that which we cannot have, we are abandoned at dawn on a field littered with corpses, we are transported until our death by projects that are no sooner completed than they must be renewed. Yet how exhausting it is to be constantly desiring...

Doubt swells and surges, with swelling doubt behind! My soul in storm is but a tattered sail, Streaming its ribbons on the torrent gale; In calm, 'tis but a limp and flapping thing: Oh! swell it with thy breath; make it a wing, To sweep through thee the ocean, with thee the wind Nor rest until in thee its haven it shall find. Roses are scentless, hopeless are the morns, Rest is but weakness, laughter crackling thorns, But love is life. To die of love is then The only pass to higher life than this. All love is death to loving, living men; All deaths are leaps across clefts to the abyss. Weakness needs pity, sometimes love's rebuke; Strength only sympathy deserves and draws - And grows by every faithful loving look. Ripeness must always come with loss of might.

The meaning is very clear; it is the meaning of all religious practice. The individual, through prolonged psychological disciplines, gives up completely all attachment to his personal limitations, idiosyncrasies, hopes and fears, no longer resists the self-annihilation that is prerequisite to rebirth in the realization of truth, and so becomes ripe, at last, for the great at-one-ment. His personal ambitions being totally dissolved, he no longer tries to live but willingly relaxes to whatever may come to pass in him; he becomes, that is to say, an anonymity. The Law lives in him with his unreserved consent.

You’re hotter than a porn star and more juicy than a ripe peach. I could eat you all night long.

And that the death we carry within us, which Rilke compares to a fruit, grows inside us until ripe, and is in other words alive, belonging to life itself.

Oh, that that old man in Westmoreland would die and be gathered to his fathers, now that he was full of years and ripe for the sickle! But there was no sign of death about the old man.

Ready to have some fun?” She didn’t give him time to answer. Weighed down with the chains, she flashed to a busy street in New York—fingers crossed he would be run over—then to a gay strip club in Italy—fingers crossed he would be groped—then to a zoo in Oklahoma—fingers crossed the elephant shit was ripe. “Enjoy,” she muttered with relish. Anya flashed one final time, back to where she’d begun: his home in Greece. Lucien was still following her trail. Lightning-quick, she hid the chains under the bed and palmed her Taser. When she straightened he was there, just in front of her. Her breath caught. He was still scowling, teeth bared and sharp, Death glowing in his eyes. He had a bleeding cut on his leg and he smelled like shit. Her nose wrinkled. “Step in something?” she asked innocently. “That, I did not mind.” He took a menacing step toward her. “What I did mind was being hit by a cab, then landing on the lap of a naked man. With an erection, Anya. He had an erection.” She grinned. She just couldn’t help herself.

To many death seems to be a brutal and meaningless end to a short and meaningless existence. So it looks, if seen from the surface and from the darkness. But when we penetrate the depths of the soul and when we try to understand its mysterious life, we shall discern that death is not a meaningless end, the mere vanishing into nothingness — it is an accomplishment, a ripe fruit on the tree of life. Nor is death an abrupt extinction, but a goal that has been unconsciously lived and worked for during half a lifetime.

The Pension Dressler stood in a side street and had, at first glance, the air rather of a farm than of a hotel. Frau Dressler's pig, tethered by one hind trotter to the jamb of the front door, roamed the yard and disputed the kitchen scraps with the poultry. He was a prodigious beast. Frau Dressler's guests prodded him appreciatively on the way to the dining-room, speculating on how soon he would be ripe for killing. The milch-goat was allowed a narrower radius; those who kept strictly to the causeway were safe, but she never reconciled herself to this limitation and, day in, day out, essayed a series of meteoric onslaughts on the passers-by, ending, at the end of her rope, with a jerk which would have been death to an animal of any other species. One day the rope would break; she knew it, and so did Frau Dressler's guests.

There is a ripeness of time for death, regarding others as well as ourselves, when it is reasonable we should drop off, and make room for another growth. When we have lived our generation out, we should not wish to encroach on another.

There is a ripeness of time for death, regarding others as well as ourselves, when it is reasonable we should drop off, and make room for another growth. When we have lived our generation out, we should not wish to encroach on another.

I know more about Emily Bronte than anyone I know. I know enough about her family to have been a part. I’ve walked with her on her damp luscious lonely moors, watched her strain to write on miniscule scraps of paper, seen her hide her works from prying eyes. I’ve brooded alongside her and participated in her taciturnity. Before her death at the ripe old age of 30, I nursed her from the things that ultimately killed her: tuberculosis with a side order of Victorian thinking.

Everything is boring, boredom is the other epidemic which is making Europe ripe for decline. Boredom is the end product of each and every civilization. It is the arteriosclerosis of the great thinking peoples. The moment always arrives where even God, whether he’s called Zeus, Zebaoth or Zoroaster, has finished creating the universe and asks: “What’s the point of it, actually?” He yawns and chucks it aside. Mankind does the same with civilization. Boredom is the condition of a people which no longer believes but all the same is doing just fine. Boredom is when every clock in the country is predestined to be correct. When the same naive flowers blossom again in the month of March. When every day the deaths of good family fathers are announced in the papers. When a war breaks out in the Balkans. When poems go on about the stars. Boredom is a symptom of aging. Boredom is the diagnosis that talent and virtue are slowly being spent. Boredom is the life-long determination to a form of being which has worn itself out.

After Your Death First, I emptied the closets of your clothes, threw out the bowl of fruit, bruised from your touch, left empty the jars you bought for preserves. The next morning, birds rustled the fruit trees, and later when I twisted a ripe fig loose from its stem, I found it half eaten, the other side already rotting, or—like another I plucked and split open—being taken from the inside: a swarm of insects hollowing it. I’m too late, again, another space emptied by loss. Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill.

Death was the Earth. Having sprung from her, the budding forms of life attempted to liberate themselves from her embrace. They set their sights on the free and open spaces. Death let them do as they wished, because she was very partial to the idea of life. She contented herself with keeping a watchful eye on her flock, and when she felt that they were fully ripe she devoured them up as if they were so many morsels of sugar. The she lay back and slowly digested the nourishment that would replenish her womb, happy and satiated as a pampered cat.

I wish I could feel your warmth, as easily as I feel his. But I don't. I feel fear. I hear fear telling me I'm a body, that's all. & the boy I love is a body. & bodies die. No other world, no return to this world in another form. (Annihilation.) It isn't that I didn't think these were the facts before. It's now, he's here. I have to try harder. Believe the facts could be at least a little wrong. Please, something. Some magic, real as this ripe life with him.

In my mind, I gave the woman gifts. I gave her a candle stub. I gave her a box of wooden kitchen matches. I gave her a cake of Lifebuoy soap. I gave her a ceilingful of glow-in-the-dark planets. I gave her a bald baby doll. I gave her a ripe fig, sweet as new wood, and a milkdrop from its stem. I gave her a peppermint puff. I gave her a bouquet of four roses. I gave her fat earthworms for her grave. I gave her a fish from Roebuck Lake, a vial of my sweat for it to swim in.

So may'st thou live, till ripe fruit thou drop into thy mother's lap, or be with ease gathered, not harshly plucked, for death mature: this is old age; but then you must outlive thy youth, thy strength, thy beauty, which will change to withered weak and grey; thy senses then obtuse, all taste of pleasure must forgo, to what thou hast, and for the air of youth hopeful and cheerful, in thy blood will reign a melancholy damp of cold and dry to weigh thy spirits down, and last consume the balm of life.

Analysis is good as a tool of enlightenment and civilization--to the extent that it shakes stupid preconceptions, quashes natural biases, and undermines authority. Good, in other words, to the extent that it liberates, refines, and humanizes--it makes slaves ripe for freedom. It is bad, very bad, to the extent that it prevents action, damages life at its roots, and is incapable of shaping it. Analysis can be very unappetizing, as unappetizing as death, to which it may very well be linked--a relative of the grave and its foul anatomy.

And ye also, to whom life is rough labour and disquiet, are ye not very tired of life? Are ye not very ripe for the sermon of death?

Into these pavilions he admitted the elect, and there, says Marco Polo, gave them to eat a certain herb, which transported them to Paradise, in the midst of ever-blooming shrubs, ever-ripe fruit, and ever-lovely virgins. What these happy persons took for reality was but a dream; but it was a dream so soft, so voluptuous, so enthralling, that they sold themselves body and soul to him who gave it to them, and obedient to his orders as to those of a deity, struck down the designated victim, died in torture without a murmur, believing that the death they underwent was but a quick transition to that life of delights of which the holy herb, now before you, had given them a slight foretaste.” “Then,” cried Franz, “it is hashish! I know that—by name at least.

I was ripe for death and along a road of perils my weakness led me to the confines of the world and of Cimmeria, home of whirlwinds and of darkness. from Delirium (II), Alchemy of the Wind - Hunger

Val turned, still naked, still impossibly beautiful. Only the gore spattered on his belly, chest, and arm, marred his perfection. He walked toward her and she couldn't help it. She backed away from him. He smiled. Sweetly. Like a boy. The dagger still in his left hand. And caught her arm with his right hand. "This is who I am, Séraphine. Naked, with blade and blood. I am vengeance. I am hate. I am sin personified. Never mistake me for the hero of this tale, for I am not and shall never be. I am the villain." And he laid his lips over hers and pushed his hot tongue into her mouth and kissed her until she couldn't breathe and it was only later that she found the bloodstains on her dress. Her lips had been sweet, like ripe figs, her mouth a cavern of delight. But her eyes- those dark inquisitor's eyes- had held only horror and disgust. Val sipped his China tea the next morning and gazed out the window. The sun shone on his garden, giving the illusion of warmth, though his empty chest was ice-cold. He could have explained to her that a razor-sharp blade was kinder than a hangman's noose. That death delivered in seconds with a few thrusts was preferable to a laughing, jabbering mob, gleeful at the jerking, agonizing execution. But those saint's eyes would've seen the hypocrisy.

Even before the First World War there was a strain in European art and music – in Germany more than anywhere – that was turning from ripeness to over-ripeness and then into something else. The last strains of the Austro-German Romantic tradition – exemplified by Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Gustav Klimt – seemed almost to have destroyed itself by reaching a pitch of ripeness from which nothing could follow other than complete breakdown. It was not just that their subject matter was so death-obsessed, but that the tradition felt as though it could not be stretched any further or innovated any more without snapping. And so it snapped: in modernism and then post-modernism.

Maybe I'd die. Maybe I'd burn to ash in wind, or blacken like the pines. Charred skeletons, I'd add one to the count. I didn't feel scared. I didn't think to panic. The trail wasn't burning. I was raw, ripe for loving. I wasn't stopping.

And you too, for whom life is hectic work and unrest: are you not very weary of life? Are you not very ripe for the sermon of death? All of you who are in love with hectic work and whatever is fast, new, strange – you find it hard to bear yourselves, your diligence is escape and the will to forget yourself. If you believed more in life, you would hurl yourself less into the moment. But you do not have enough content in yourselves for waiting – not even for laziness! Everywhere

Professor Sprout awarded Gryffindor twenty points when Harry passed her a watering can; a beaming Professor Flitwick pressed a box of squeaking sugar mice on him at the end of Charms, said, ‘Shh!’ and hurried away; and Professor Trelawney broke into hysterical sobs during Divination and announced to the startled class, and a very disapproving Umbridge, that Harry was not going to suffer an early death after all, but would live to a ripe old age, become Minister for Magic and have twelve children.

Could I ever feel any less for this body? Why does ardour pass? Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.

Well the end is coming, isn't it? We spend our entire lives running from it. No speaking of it allowed. Fearing it for our loved ones." She shook her head and folded the burp cloth in her hand. "But after all we've seen of the world, I decided I'll get more joy out of the days I have left if I just acknowledge that death is part of life. The leaves on an apple tree blossom yield and fall. No use fretting over the sweetness of the fruit. Got to pick it when it looks ripe and move on. It's the fool who's forlorn over what he imagines he's lost. I'm sure that's in the Gospel somewhere." Even if it wasn't, Rachel would amend the text to her liking. The Word according to Rachel, as some complained. Not Marilla of course. Rachel was her closest friend, so she kept quiet, in Cuthbert fashion.

When your body is clear there is control. When your body is clear you can choose whom to let in. There is love everywhere. Please cradle my rabbit heart. Please navigate yourself around me well. I know too much. I can recognize darkness because he is my brother, my maker. I can drink lightness because it is the only way to survive. I can shut off my heart but that leads to evil, so I express her and revel in the nuance of blood currents, and the sacred demons. I fear and quake with my eyes darting fight or flight love or die. The lightning comes from below this time and rips out of my throat for the world to see. They all see my rabbit and I have trained her to hunt. In her perfect glory she is shy and extroverted, chaste and perverted, my sweet near-death more alive than ever. Take her. Take me while I am ripe and open, rub berries on my lips and bear fat in my hair. Tattoo me with a needle and impale me with your warmth. Heal me, fuck me, and work my heart till she beats strong and unafraid. Haunches bared, teeth sharpened, wide-eyed and aware. Hurry. I want to feel safe.

Terror came. I would fall into a slumber of days, and getting up would go on with the same sad dreams. I was ripe for death and along a road of perils my weakness led me to the confines of the world and of Cimmeria, home of whirlwinds and of darkness. - Delirium II - Alchemy of the Word

If you hadn’t found the way into the tombs tonight, I probably would have done something foolish.” “So long as you take me with you.” “I’d rather you didn’t get killed for my foolishness.” “I have been resigned to dying for a long time.” “Fenris…” “No, no, don’t sound stricken. What else am I good for? You gave me something useful to do with my death. I will be grateful forever.” “No dying,” said Marra angrily. “I don’t want you to die! I want you to live to a ripe, old age so that I can say, ‘Hey, Fenris, remember the time we went into a horrible catacomb and the dust-wife said something cryptic and Agnes waved a baby chick at us,’ and you say, ‘Of course I remember,’ and I don’t have to try to explain to someone who wasn’t there.” The silence from the other side of the room was suddenly deeper and more textured. Marra bit her lip. “Besides,” she said, after a moment, “someone has to chop all my firewood. I’ve gotten spoiled.” “Hmm.

Think constantly how many doctors have died, after knitting their brows over their own patients how many astrologers, after predicting the deaths of others, as if death were something important; how many philosophers, after endless deliberation on death or immortality; how many heroes, after the many others they killed; how many tyrants, after using their power over men’s lives with monstrous insolence, as if they themselves were immortal. Think too how many whole cities have died – Helice, Pompeii, Herculaneum, innumerable others. Go over now all those you have known yourself, one after the other: one man follows a friend’s funeral and is then laid out himself, then another follows him – and all in a brief space of time. The conclusion of this? You should always look on human life as short and cheap. Yesterday sperm: tomorrow a mummy or ashes. So one should pass through this tiny fragment of time in tune with nature, and leave it gladly, as an olive might fall when ripe, blessing the earth which bore it and grateful to the tree which gave it growth.

She sat out on her balcony and watched the sun go down. The sky was so flush with color it looked ripe as a berry. Slowly, the color drained to a velvet dark. The humidity broke, and the air held a crispness that signified the approach of fall. Already, the first of the maple leaves had fallen to the driveway, curling in on themselves like dark, dying buds.

If we then hunt for death, why do we fear it? If we fear it, why do we follow it? If we do fear, how can we shun it? If we do fear, with fear we do but aid The thing we fear, to seize on us the sooner. If we fear not, then no resolved proffer Can overthrow the limit of our fate, For, whether ripe or rotten, drop we shall, As we do draw the lottery of our doom.

There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death—those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement—been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.

Each of us reaches the set upper limit of his personal potential, and thereafter ceases to develop. That is the basis of old age, this incapacity for change. We stop on our own journey. It happens to some people in midlife, and to others as soon as they finish their education. Yet others go on developing into ripe old age, right up to death in fact, but they are a rarity.

there is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death - those montrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement - been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.

I have seen people paralyze their entire existence around that greatest of mysteries, shaping their every movement, their every word, in a desperate attempt to find the answers to the unanswerable. They fool themselves, either through their interpretations of ancient texts or through some obscure sign from a natural event, into believing that they have found the ultimate truth, and thus, if they behave accordingly concerning that truth, they will surely be rewarded in the afterlife. This must be the greatest manifestation of that fear of death, the errant belief that we can somehow shape and decorate eternity itself, that we can curtain its windows and place its furniture in accordance with our own desperate desires. Perhaps the greatest evil I see in this existence is when supposedly holy men prey upon the basic fears of death of the common folk to take from them. 'Give to the church!' they cry. 'Only then will you find salvation!'. Even more subtle are the many religions that do not directly ask for a person's coin, but insist that anyone of goodly and godly heart who is destined for their particular description of heaven, would willingly give that coin over. And of course, the world is ripe with 'Doomsdayers'. people who claim that the end of the world is at hand, and cry for repentance and for almost slavish dedication. I can only look on it all and sigh, for as death is the greatest mystery, so it is the most personal of revelations. We will not know, none of us, until the moment it is upon us, and we cannot truly and in good conscience convince another of our beliefs.

reasons that one generation must give way to the next, as made clear in another of the letters Jefferson wrote to the equally venerable John Adams near the end of his life: “There is a ripeness of time for death, regarding others as well as ourselves, when it is reasonable we should drop off, and make room for another growth. When we have lived our generation out, we should not wish to encroach on another.

Shakespeare's plays do not present easy solutions. The audience has to decide for itself. King Lear is perhaps the most disturbing in this respect. One of the key words of the whole play is 'Nothing'. When King Lear's daughter Cordelia announces that she can say 'Nothing' about her love for her father, the ties of family love fall apart, taking the king from the height of power to the limits of endurance, reduced to 'nothing' but 'a poor bare forked animal'. Here, instead of 'readiness' to accept any challenge, the young Edgar says 'Ripeness is all'. This is a maturity that comes of learning from experience. But, just as the audience begins to see hope in a desperate and violent situation, it learns that things can always get worse: Who is't can say 'I am at the worst?' … The worst is not So long as we can say 'This is the worst.' Shakespeare is exploring and redefining the geography of the human soul, taking his characters and his audience further than any other writer into the depths of human behaviour. The range of his plays covers all the 'form and pressure' of mankind in the modern world. They move from politics to family, from social to personal, from public to private. He imposed no fixed moral, no unalterable code of behaviour. That would come to English society many years after Shakespeare's death, and after the tragic hypothesis of Hamlet was fulfilled in 1649, when the people killed the King and replaced his rule with the Commonwealth. Some critics argue that Shakespeare supported the monarchy and set himself against any revolutionary tendencies. Certainly he is on the side of order and harmony, and his writing reflects a monarchic context rather than the more republican context which replaced the monarchy after 1649. It would be fanciful to see Shakespeare as foretelling the decline of the Stuart monarchy. He was not a political commentator. Rather, he was a psychologically acute observer of humanity who had a unique ability to portray his observations, explorations, and insights in dramatic form, in the richest and most exciting language ever used in the English theatre.

That, thought Mrs. Fisher, her eyes going steadily line by line down the page and not a word of it getting through into her consciousness, is foolish of friends. It is condemning one to a premature death. One should continue (of course with dignity) to develop, however old one may be. She had nothing against developing, against further ripeness, because as long as one was alive one was not dead—obviously, decided Mrs. Fisher, and development, change, ripening, were life. What she would dislike would be unripening, going back to something green. She would dislike it intensely; and this is what she felt she was on the brink of doing. Naturally it made her very uneasy, and only in constant movement could she find distraction. Increasingly restless and no longer able to confine herself to her battlements, she wandered more and more frequently, and also aimlessly, in and out of the top garden,

Sugar substitutes aren’t any better. Many people (including me when I was overweight) turn to artificial sugars to quell their cravings without packing on the pounds. Back then I would have happily performed heart surgery with a Diet Coke in my hand if only I could have found a way to sterilize it! But ironically, although these products are supposed to aid in weight loss, they do just the opposite. That’s because products such as sucralose, saccharin, aspartame, and other nonnutritive artificial sweeteners kill your gut buddies and allow the bad bugs to multiply. Believe it or not, a Duke University study28 showed that a single Splenda packet kills 50 percent of normal intestinal flora! It’s sad but true: if you eat too much of anything sweet, your gut buddies will starve to death, and your bad bugs will live long and prosper—and multiply. Even fructose, the sugar in fruit, has been shown to be a mitochrondrial poison! There goes the neighborhood.

Think continually how many physicians have died, after often knitting their foreheads over their patients; how many astrologers after prophesying other men's deaths, as though to die were a great matter; how many philosophers after endless debate on death or survival after death; how many paladins after slaying their thousands; how many tyrants after using their power over men's lives with monstrous arrogance, as if themselves immortal; how many entire cities have, if I may use the term, died, Helice, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and others innumerable. Run over, too, the many also you know of, one after another. One followed this man's funeral and then was himself laid on the bier; another followed him, and all in a little while. This is the whole matter: see always how ephemeral and cheap are the things of man- yesterday, a spot of albumen, tomorrow, ashes or a mummy. Therefore make your passage through this span of time in obedience to Nature and gladly lay down your life, as an olive, when ripe, might fall, blessing her who bare it and grateful to thee which gave it life.

Analysis as an instrument of enlightenment and civilization is good, in so far as it shatters absurd convictions, acts as a solvent upon natural prejudices, and undermines authority; good, in other words, in that it sets free, refines, humanizes, makes slaves ripe for freedom. But it is bad, very bad, in so far as it stands in the way of action, cannot shape the vital forces, maims life at its roots. Analysis can be a very unappetizing affair, as much so as death, with which it may well belong—allied to the grave and its unsavory anatomy.

After their time in the monastery, most young men and women will return to their villages, having completed their training with the elders. They are now accepted as “ripe,” as initiated men and women, respected in their community. Outwardly they will have learned the religious forms and sacred rituals of the Buddhist community. Inwardly, these ancient forms are intended to awaken an unshakable virtue and inner respect, fearlessness in the face of death, self-reliance, wisdom, and profound compassion. These qualities give one who leaves the monastery the hallmark of a mature man or woman.

I suppose one night hundreds of thousands of years ago in a cave by a night, fire when one of those shaggy men wakened to gaze over the banked coals at his woman, his children, and thought of their being cold, dead, gone forever. Then he must have wept. And he put out his hand in the night to the woman who must die some day and to the children who must follow her. And for a little bit next morning, he treated them somewhat better, for he saw that they, like himself, had the seed of night in them. He felt that seed like slime in his pulse, splitting, making more against the day they would multiply his body into darkness. So that man, the first one, knew what we know now: our hour is short, eternity is long. With this knowledge came pity and mercy, so we spared others for the later, more intricate, more mysterious benefits of love. So, in sum, what are we? We are the creatures that know and know too much. That leaves us with such a burden again we have no choice, to laugh or cry. No other animal does either. We do both, depending on the season and the need. Somehow, I feel the carnival watches, to see which we're doing and how and why, and moves in on us when it feels we're ripe.

The teachers were, of course, forbidden from mentioning the interview by Educational Decree Number Twenty-six, but they found ways to express their feelings about it all the same. Professor Sprout awarded Gryffindor twenty points when Harry passed her a watering can; a beaming Professor Flitwick pressed a box of squeaking sugar mice on him at the end of Charms, said “Shh!” and hurried away; and Professor Trelawney broke into hysterical sobs during Divination and announced to the startled class, and a very disapproving Umbridge, that Harry was not going to suffer an early death after all, but would live to a ripe old age, become Minister of Magic, and have twelve children.

Madness—the kind you lock away—breeds sophistries, and I haven’t avoided a single one. I could list them all: I’ve got them down. My health suffered. Terror struck. I’d sleep for days, and, risen, such sad dreams would stay with me. I was ripe for death, and down a dangerous road my weakness drew me to the edges of the earth and on to Cimmeria, that dark country of winds. I sought voyages, to disperse enchantments that had colonized my mind. Above a sea I came to love as if it were rinsing me of stain, I watched a consoling cross rise. Damnation, in the shape of a rainbow. Bliss was my undoing, my remorse, my worm: my life would always be too ungovernable to devote to strength and beauty.

But Eugene was untroubled by thought of a goal. He was mad with such ecstasy as he had never known. He was a centaur, moon-eyed and wild of name, torn apart with hunger for the golden world. He became at times almost incapable of coherent speech. While talking with people, he would whinny suddenly into their startled faces, and leap away, his face contorted with an idiot joy. He would hurl himself squealing through the streets and along the paths, touched with the ecstasy of a thousand unspoken desires. The world lay before him for his picking—full of opulent cities, golden vintages, glorious triumphs, lovely women, full of a thousand unmet and magnificent possibilities. Nothing was dull or tarnished. The strange enchanted coasts were unvisited. He was young and he could never die. He went back to Pulpit Hill for two or three days of delightful loneliness in the deserted college. He prowled through the empty campus at midnight under the great moons of the late rich Spring; he breathed the thousand rich odours of tree and grass and flower, of the opulent and seductive South; and he felt a delicious sadness when he thought of his departure, and saw there in the moon the thousand phantom shapes of the boys he had known who would come no more. He still loitered, although his baggage had been packed for days. With a desperate pain, he faced departure from that Arcadian wilderness where he had known so much joy. At night he roamed the deserted campus, talking quietly until morning with a handful of students who lingered strangely, as he did, among the ghostly buildings, among the phantoms of lost boys. He could not face a final departure. He said he would return early in autumn for a few days, and at least once a year thereafter. Then one hot morning, on sudden impulse, he left. As the car that was taking him to Exeter roared down the winding street, under the hot green leafiness of June, he heard, as from the sea-depth of a dream, far-faint, the mellow booming of the campus bell. And suddenly it seemed to him that all the beaten walks were thudding with the footfalls of lost boys, himself among them, running for their class. Then, as he listened, the far bell died away, and the phantom runners thudded into oblivion. The car roared up across the lip of the hill, and drove steeply down into the hot parched countryside below. As the lost world faded from his sight, Eugene gave a great cry of pain and sadness, for he knew that the elfin door had closed behind him, and that he would never come back again. He saw the vast rich body of the hills, lush with billowing greenery, ripe-bosomed, dappled by far-floating cloudshadows. But it was, he knew, the end. Far-forested, the horn-note wound. He was wild with the hunger for release: the vast champaign of earth stretched out for him its limitless seduction. It was the end, the end. It was the beginning of the voyage, the quest of new lands. Gant was dead. Gant was living, death-in-life. In

A boy who is still a child grows baby teeth and loses them all in seven years. When God makes him fourteen, the signs of maturity begin to shine on his body. In the third seven, limbs growing, chin bearded, his skin acquires the color of manhood. In the fourth age a man is at a peak in strength—a sign in man of excellence. The time is ripe in the fifth for a young man to think of marriage and of offspring. In the sixth the mind of man is trained in all things; he doesn't try the impossible. In the seventh and eighth, that is, fourteen years, he speaks most eloquently in his life. He can still do much in the ninth but his speech and thought are discernibly less keen, and if he makes the full measure of ten sevens, when death comes, it will not come too soon.

For Mersault, nothing mattered in those days. And the first time Marthe went limp in his arms and her features blurred as they came closer - the lips that had been as motionless as painted flowers now quivering and extended - Mersault saw in her not the future but all the force of his desire focused upon her and and satisfied by this appearance, this image. The lips she offered him seemed a message from a world without passion and swollen with desire, where his heart would find satisfaction. And this seemed a miracle to him. His heard pounded with an emotion he almost took for love. And when he felt the ripe and resilient flesh under his teeth, it was as though he bit into a kind of fierce liberty, after caressing her a long time with his own lips. She became his mistress that same day.

Faith and troth now, master," quoth Sancho, "you did ill to talk of death, Heaven bless us, it is no child's play; you have e'en spoiled my dinner; the very thought of raw bones and lanthorn jaws make me sick. Death eats up all things, both the young lamb and old sheep; and I have heard our parson say, death values a prince no more than a clown; all is fish that comes to his net; he throws at all, and sweeps stakes; he is no mower that takes a nap at noon-day, but drives on, fair weather or foul, and cuts down the green grass as well as the ripe corn: he is neither squeamish nor queasy-stomached, for he swallows without chewing, and crams down all things into his ungracious maw; and though you can see no belly he has, he has a confounded dropsy, and thirsts after men's lives, which he guzzles down like mother's milk.

Sunday Morning V She says, "But in contentment I still feel The need of some imperishable bliss." Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams And our desires. Although she strews the leaves Of sure obliteration on our paths, The path sick sorrow took, the many paths Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love Whispered a little out of tenderness, She makes the willow shiver in the sun For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet. She causes boys to pile new plums and pears On disregarded plate. The maidens taste And stray impassioned in the littering leaves. VI Is there no change of death in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, With rivers like our own that seek for seas They never find, the same receding shores That never touch with inarticulate pang? Why set the pear upon those river-banks Or spice the shores with odors of the plum? Alas, that they should wear our colors there, The silken weavings of our afternoons, And pick the strings of our insipid lutes! Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly. VII Supple and turbulent, a ring of men Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn Their boisterous devotion to the sun, Not as a god, but as a god might be, Naked among them, like a savage source. Their chant shall be a chant of paradise, Out of their blood, returning to the sky; And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice, The windy lake wherein their lord delights, The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills, That choir among themselves long afterward. They shall know well the heavenly fellowship Of men that perish and of summer morn. And whence they came and whither they shall go The dew upon their feet shall manifest. VIII She hears, upon that water without sound, A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay." We live in an old chaos of the sun, Or old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, Of that wide water, inescapable. Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings

Well, life is short at the best: seventy years, they say, pass like like a vapour, like a dream when one awaketh; and every path trod by human feet terminates in one bourne — the grave: the little chink in the surface of this great globe — the furrow where the mighty husbandman with the scythe deposits the seed he has shaken from the ripe stem; and there it falls, decays, and thence it springs again, when the world has rolled round a few times more. So much for the body: the soul meantime wings its long flight upward, folds its wings on the brink of the sea of fire and glass, and gazing down through the burning clearness, finds there mirrored the vision of the Christian's triple Godhead: the Sovereign Father; the Mediating Son; the Creator Spirit. Such words, at least, have been chosen to express what is inexpressible: to describe what baffles description. The soul's real hereafter, who shall guess?

While he digs he is free to let his mind wander, and he dreams his kingdom of pear trees in the orchard across to his left, growing skywards, gnarling, putting forth fat green soft fruits with ease each year. The trees that already grow in the orchards he loves almost as women in his life; the Catherine pear, the Chesil or pear Nouglas, the great Kentish pear, the Ruddick, the Red Garnet, the Norwich, the Windsor, the little green pear ripe at Kingsdon Feast; all thriving where they were planted in his father's ground at Lytes Cary before the management of the estate became his own responsibility as the eldest son. So much has happened these last six years since his father handed over and left for his house in Sherborne: there have been births and deaths - Anys herself was taken from him only last year. But the pear trees live on, reliably flowering and yielding variable quantities as an annual crop that defines the estate, and he has plans to add more.

After centuries with an empty womb, my mother bore both my sister and me within a span of five years. My father was fading by then—he was centuries older than my mother. But Fionn did not consider my mother a worthy successor. The crown should go to the eldest child, he said—to my sister, Helena. It was time, he thought, for a new generation to lead. It did not sit well with my mother, or with many of those in her court—especially her general, Pelias. He agreed with my mother that Helena was too young to inherit our father’s throne. But my mother was still in her prime. Still ripe with power, and it was clear that she’d been blessed by the gods themselves, since she had been gifted children at long last. So it was just as it had been before: those behind the throne worked to upend it. The image shifted to some sort of marsh—a bog. Fionn rode a horse between the islands of grass, bow at the ready as he ducked beneath trees in bloom. My parents often went hunting in the vast slice of land the Daglan had kept for their private game park, where they had crafted terrible monsters to serve as worthy prey. It was there that he met his death.

Then Faust descends into the realm of the Mothers — the spiritual world; he succeeds in bringing up with him the spirit of Helena. But he is not ripe enough to unite this spirit with his own soul. Hence the scene where desire stirs in Faust, where he wishes to embrace the archetype of Helena with sensual passion. He is therefore thrust back. That is the fate of everyone who seeks to approach the Spiritual World harboring personal, egotistical feelings; he is repelled like Faust. He must first mature; must learn the real relationship between the three members of man's nature: the immortal spirit which goes on from life to life, from incarnation to incarnation; the body, commencing and ending its existence between birth and death, and the soul between the two of them. Body, soul and spirit — how they unite, how they mutually react — that is the lesson Faust must learn. The archetype of Helena, the immortal, the eternal, that passes from life to life, from one incarnation to the other, Faust has already tried to find, but was then immature. Now he is to become ripe so that he is worthy to truly penetrate into the spirit realm. For this purpose he had to learn that this immortality comes to man only when he can be re-embodied repeatedly within physical existence — have new lives extending from birth to death. Therefore must Goethe show how the soul lives between spirit and body, how the soul is placed between the immortal spirit and the body which exists only between birth and death. The second part of Faust shows us this. Now can Goethe compress all that Faust has achieved since the time of premonitory striving, the time when he despaired of science and turned away from it, till he gained his highest degree of spiritual perception. This he does in the chorus mysticus which, by its name alone, indicates that it contains something very deep. Here, in this chorus, is to be condensed in few words — paradigmatically — that which offers the key to all the world mysteries: how everything temporal is only a symbolism for the eternal. What the physical eye can see is only a symbol for the spiritual, the immortal of which Goethe has shown that he, when entering into this spiritual realm, even gains the knowledge of reincarnation. He will finally show man's entrance into the spiritual kingdom coincides with the knowledge that what was premonition and hope in the physical is truth in the spiritual; what was aspiration in the physical becomes attainment in the spiritual world.

They lived in a world of destruction and fortuitous death. All was chance, and it was not even the Devil who threw the dice, for he was part of the fairy-tale and perished with it. It had hardly been worth while to pick a bone with it, for the only thing to quarrel with was one's own credulity in having ever believed a tale that broke down at so many points when put to the test. Year by year boys fresh from school joined in the dance of death, and sweltered in the reeking, stinking heat, when they should have been playing cricket or swimming in cool waters, and they got trench-fever and were gassed, and young limbs swift to run and ripe for love were gashed by bullets and sawn off in hospitals. The fate of the world rested on their shoulders: they were the bewildered scapegoats who were driven out into this desert of death, to expiate the criminal pride and folly of those who had been in charge of world-affairs while they were yet unbreeched. Save for rare moments of panic, they maintained a cheerful carelessness, a studied unconsciousness of the surrounding horror, for to think about it, to realize it and speak of it was to go mad. A few went mad, and with bandaged eyes awaited the volley they would never hear. The rest carried on, dumb and gallant, saying nothing, except in a few blurted words to a friend, of that smouldering focus of resentment and despair.

I remembered meeting the Dharma Raja’s gaze and wreathing his neck with a wedding garland of sweet marigold and blood red roses. Death clung to him subtly, robbing the warmth of his eyes and silvering his beauty with a wintry touch. And yet, I saw how he was beautiful. It was his presence that conjured the brilliant peacock shades of the late-season monsoon sky. It was his aura that withered sun-ripe mangos and ushered in the lush winter fruits of custard apple and singhora chestnuts. And it was his stride that adorned the Kalidas Mountains with coronets of snow clouds. His hands moved to my shoulders, warm and solid, and his arms were a universe for me alone. He had enthralled me, unwound the seams of my being until I was filled with the sight of him and still ached with want. “I hoped you would choose me,” he said. I blushed, suddenly aware of my unbraceleted arms and simple sari. “I have no dowry.” He laughed, a hesitant, half-nervous sound that did not match his stern features. “I don’t care.” “Then what do you want from me?” “I want to lie beside you and know the weight of your dreams,” he said, brushing his lips against my knuckles. “I want to share whole worlds with you and write your name in the stars.” He moved closer and a chorus of songbirds twittered silver melodies. “I want to measure eternity with your laughter.” Now, he stood inches from me; his rough hands encircled my waist. “Be my queen and I promise you a life where you will never be bored. I promise you more power than a hundred kings. And I promise you that we will always be equals.

From this moment, start looking at everything as a blessing. And when I say everything, I mean everything. Even when you sometimes feel pain it is a blessing. You may not understand, but it is a blessing. One day you will understand and you will see that it was a blessing, that it was needed, absolutely needed, that it helped your growth. Even suffering is a blessing. It cleanses, it helps you to become integrated, it takes away childishness, it helps you to become mature. A certain ripeness arises out of suffering. A man who has never suffered remains childish, juvenile, superficial. He can’t understand life’s deeper things. He thinks that life is just a merry-go-round, so he goes on moving from one sensation to another. He is continuously greedy and hankering for all kinds of toys. But they are toys. A man who has suffered enough becomes mature. He can see that toys are toys — not worth the labor, not worth the worry. He can understand the depth and can see other people’s lives with more sympathy, with more compassion, with more love. Because he has suffered, he knows what suffering is. That makes him more human. So suffering too is a blessing. Watch, observe and try to find a blessing everywhere. Sometimes it is in disguise and sometimes not so disguised, sometimes utterly nude. But if you watch, you will find it is always there; in success, in failure, in pain, in pleasure, in life, in death too. It is there in summer, it is there in winter, it is there in youth, it is there in old age. It is there in health, it is there in illness. I call that person religious who can see blessings everywhere, who cannot find any place, any point which is not a blessing.

Bharata, do not think that I have no sympathy for you in this your predicament. I understand it fully. But, then, my child, no man is allowed to do as he pleases. Man has no freedom. Fate tosses him about in all directions. The game which Fate plays is unpredictable. Nothing lasts in this world. What has been gathered is scattered about. What was once at the top soon reaches the lowest position. Meetings only end in separations and, as for life, it only ends in death. Ripe fruits have but one fear, that of falling down. And even so, man has no fear other than death. Think of a house built sturdily with strong pillars. Even that, in course of time, becomes weak and ancient. Men too become old, lose their power of thinking and death claims them. The night which passes will never come back and the waters of the Yamuna which flow fast, when in flood, towards the sea, will never return. In this world, Bharata, just as the waters on the surface of the earth get less and less, dried constantly by the rays of the sun, man’s life also gets lessened day by day. Your life and mine are fast ebbing away. Think on the Lord, my child. Do not spend your time in the contemplation of another’s life. Death walks with us: and he accompanies us on the longest journey we undertake. The skin gets wrinkled. Hair grows white. Old age makes man weak and helpless. Man delights at the sight of the sun rising and again, the setting sun is pleasing to the eye. But man forgets that every sunrise and every sunset has lessened one’s life on earth by another day. The seasons come and go and each season has a charm of its own. But they come and when they go, they take with them large slices of our lives every time. On the large expanse of the sea two pieces of wood come together. They float together for a while and then they are parted. Even so it is with man and his relationship with life, child, kinsmen, wealth and other possessions. Meetings end only in separation. It is the law of nature. No one is capable of altering the course of Fate. Weeping for one who is dead will not bring him back to life.

Ready yourselves!' Mullone heard himself say, which was strange, he thought, for he knew his men were prepared. A great cry came from beyond the walls that were punctuated by musket blasts and Mullone readied himself for the guns to leap into action. Mullone felt a tremor. The ground shook and then the first rebels poured through the gates like an oncoming tide. Mullone saw the leading man; both hands gripping a green banner, face contorted with zeal. The flag had a white cross in the centre of the green field and the initials JF below it. John Fitzstephen. Then, there were more men behind him, tens, then scores. And then time seemed to slow. The guns erupted barely twenty feet from them. Later on, Mullone would remember the great streaks of flame leap from the muzzles to lick the air and all of the charging rebels were shredded and torn apart in one terrible instant. Balls ricocheted on stone and great chunks were gouged out by the bullets. Blood sprayed on the walls as far back as the arched gateway, limbs were shorn off, and Mullone watched in horror as a bloodied head tumbled down the sloped street towards the barricade. 'Jesus sweet suffering Christ!' Cahill gawped at the carnage as the echo of the big guns resonated like a giant's beating heart. Trooper O'Shea bent to one side and vomited at the sight of the twitching, bleeding and unrecognisable lumps that had once been men. A man staggered with both arms missing. Another crawled back to the gate with a shattered leg spurting blood. The stench of burnt flesh and the iron tang of blood hung ripe and nauseating in the oppressive air. One of the low wooden cabins by the wall was on fire. A blast of musketry outside the walls rattled against the stonework and a redcoat toppled backwards onto the cabin's roof as the flames fanned over the wood. 'Here they come again! Ready your firelocks! Do not waste a shot!' Johnson shouted in a steady voice as the gateway became thick with more rebels. He took a deep breath. 'God forgive us,' Corporal Brennan said. 'Liberty or death!' A rebel, armed with a blood-stained pitchfork, shouted over-and-over.

Jesus, then, went to Jerusalem not just to preach, but to die. Schweitzer was right: Jesus believed that the messianic woes were about to burst upon Israel, and that he had to take them upon himself, solo. In the Temple and the upper room, Jesus deliberately enacted two symbols, which encapsulated his whole work and agenda. The first symbol said: the present system is corrupt and recalcitrant. It is ripe for judgment. But Jesus is the Messiah, the one through whom YHWH, the God of all the world, will save Israel and thereby the world. And the second symbol said: this is how the true exodus will come about. This is how evil will be defeated. This is how sins will be forgiven. Jesus knew—he must have known—that these actions, and the words which accompanied and explained them, were very likely to get him put on trial as a false prophet leading Israel astray, and as a would-be Messiah; and that such a trial, unless he convinced the court otherwise, would inevitably result in his being handed over to the Romans and executed as a (failed) revolutionary king. This did not, actually, take a great deal of “supernatural” insight, any more than it took much more than ordinary common sense to predict that, if Israel continued to attempt rebellion against Rome, Rome would eventually do to her as a nation what she was now going to do to this strange would-be Messiah. But at the heart of Jesus’ symbolic actions, and his retelling of Israel’s story, there was a great deal more than political pragmatism, revolutionary daring, or the desire for a martyr’s glory. There was a deeply theological analysis of Israel, the world, and his own role in relation to both. There was a deep sense of vocation and trust in Israel’s god, whom he believed of course to be God. There was the unshakable belief—Gethsemane seems nearly to have shaken it, but Jesus seems to have construed that, too, as part of the point, part of the battle—that if he went this route, if he fought this battle, the long night of Israel’s exile would be over at last, and the new day for Israel and the world really would dawn once and for all. He himself would be vindicated (of course; all martyrs believed that); and Israel’s destiny, to save the world, would thereby be accomplished. Not only would he create a breathing space for his followers and any who would join them, by drawing on to himself for a moment the wrath of Rome and letting them escape; if he was defeating the real enemy, he was doing so on behalf of the whole world. The servant-vocation, to be the light of the world, would come true in him, and thence in the followers who would regroup after his vindication. The death of the shepherd would result in YHWH becoming king of all the earth. The vindication of the “son of man” would see the once-for-all defeat of evil, the rescue of the true Israel, and the establishment of a worldwide kingdom. Jesus therefore took up his own cross. He had come to see it, too, in deeply symbolic terms: symbolic, now, not merely of Roman oppression, but of the way of love and peace which he had commended so vigorously, the way of defeat which he had announced as the way of victory. Unlike his actions in the Temple and the upper room, the cross was a symbol not of praxis but of passivity, not of action but of passion. It was to become the symbol of victory, but not of the victory of Caesar, nor of those who would oppose Caesar with Caesar’s methods. It was to become the symbol, because it would be the means, of the victory of God.14

The first step was to organize his disciples into ranks. With himself as grand master, he structured those beneath him in six grades, the last being the fida’i. Meaning ‘the devoted ones’, the fida’i were the foot soldiers who, without consideration to their own personal safety or life, would unswervingly carry out their orders. If necessary, they would bide their time for months until the moment was ripe, studying their victims’ lives in intricate detail. To die in the pursuit of their duty was considered a privilege and would ensure entry into Paradise. This dedication to the task and fanatical lack of fear for death made the fida’i feared throughout Islam.

Such indirection and ambivalence typify the politics of Wong's work. He's not in any conventional sense an ideological filmmaker. "It's never been my intention," he said at the Cannes press conference for 2046, "to make films with any political content whatsoever." A cautious man allergic to grand pronouncements, he doesn't make message movies, much less give political speeches or man the barricades. The rise of China has been the biggest story in the world for the last 20 years--no place has felt this more deeply than Hong Kong--yet Wong's work is notable for its apparent lack of interest in post-revolutionary China, either in its Maoist incarnation or today's hyper-capitalist model launched by Deng Xiaoping, whose death appears in a news report Lai watches in Happy Together. It's not that he doesn't thing about political issues, but he weaves his ideas (and they are intuitions more than ideological stances) into the intricate fabric of his work. This makes him ripe for interpretation, especially by critical admirers who, almost to a one, prefer to think of him as being some sort of social radical whose political ideas bubble beneath the surface of his work.

Most people regard death as the greatest of evils, only because they fear death. They fear death only because they have the instinct of self-preservation. Hereupon pessimistic philosophy and religion propose to attain to Nirvana by the extinction of Will-to-live, or by the total annihilation of life. But this is as much as to propose death as the final cure to a patient. Elie Metchnikoff proposes, in his 'Nature of Man,' another cure, saying: 'If man could only contrive to live long enough—say, for one hundred and forty years—a natural desire for extinction would take the place of the instinct for self-preservation, and the call of death would then harmoniously satisfy his legitimate craving of a ripe old age.' Why, we must ask, do you trouble yourself so much about death? Is there any instance of an individual who escaped it in the whole history of mankind? If there be no way of escape, why do you trouble yourself about it?

Lakia yawns. “I hope all your courtesans aren’t defeated so easily.” “Yes, it will make for a tedious day,” Tarek replies, sipping his flask. I cut them a glare. Ameya just sacrificed her life. She wanted freedom from being a courtesan so much that death was a better alternative. I want to shred Tarek’s pampered face with my nails, but I do as Mathura said. I absorb my hatred and let it feed me, transforming it into something bigger, meaner, uglier. I will wait. I will crouch in the dark until the time is ripe, and then I will eat Rajah Tarek alive.

My health was menaced. Terror came. For days on end I fell asleep and, when I woke, the dark dreams continued. I was ripe for death. My debility led me along a route of dangers, to the world’s edge, to Cimmeria, the country of black fog and whirlwinds. I was forced to travel, to ward off the apparitions assembled in my brain." - Rimbaud, Une Saison en enfer He was a great walker. Oh! An astonishing walker, his coat open, a little fez on his head in spite of the sun. Righas, on Rimbaud in Ethiopia … along horrible tracks like those presumed to exist on the moon. Rimbaud, writing home

Higher emotion equals higher energy. When you become angry you sweat, you stammer your words, and your skin gets hot. Now imagine the vortex of emotions when there’s a murder, rape, or traumatic death. All those emotions now become supercharged. It’s like running the RPMs in a race car into the red zone. It doesn’t have to be the last emotions before death either. The extreme loneliness and depression of a broken heart can put your emotions in the red zone also. An inmate at Ohio State Reformatory set himself on fire in his cell. That was a supercharged emotional event like no other. I believe that the atmosphere becomes imprinted with that severe energy and it becomes ripe for residual hauntings. That’s why you hear screams in haunted places from the supercharged emotional state.

Whitman, you once told me, is democracy on the page, messy and imperfect as we are in real life, which gave you hope that we would one day make real life true democracy, ripe blossom, pollen dusting every moment and person, each scampering mote of light. This is why as you lay dying, I read “I Hear America Singing” and knew you heard every word and could feel my hand on yours though you were already moving toward other miracles than this life. A sunflower followed your motion and a yellow dog stood guard. You, who lived the notion that the sun belongs to each and every one, beggars, dreamers, kings, all. You who believed banks could have hearts, for god’s sake! You have left it to us, messy and imperfect as we are and will be, to keep to the work side by side and as long as it takes, all the while singing of miracles just as Whitman and you taught us to do.

How exactly did you get to know Death?” “Bumped into ’em at the grocery store. Showed ’em how to pick a ripe avocado.

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality. ― Seneca Imagination varies from person to person; it starts from birth, whereas raw science, poetry, and all other subjects are in the first phase of imagination before turning to positive or negative but ripe reality. Suffering rarely happens and is as short as fear, hopelessness, or greediness. ― Ehsan Sehgal No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. ― Plato Evil attacks good ones, not bad ones, only in life, not after death. Human history confirms it. ― Ehsan Sehgal