Death
Death is not something from the outside, ontologically different from life, because there is no death independent of life. To step into death does not mean, as commonly believed, especially by Christians, to draw one’s last breath and to pass into a region qualitatively different from life. It means, rather, to discover in the course of life the way towards life and to find in life’s vital signs the immanent abyss of death. … Healthy, normal, mediocre people cannot experience either agony or death. They live as if life had a definite character. … That is why they perceive death as coming from the outside, not as an inner fatality of life itself. One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death’s prisoner [emphasis added] (Cioran, 1992, p. 23).
Superior and mediocre people alike try to get their head around death. Cioran thinks that mediocre people accept life as a given, then try to explain death as a separate issue. It is the superior person who intimately links life and death together. Reductionism pulls life and death apart to see how they work. Why do we dissect the golden goose when the gold eggs buy us food for the table? In a bid for freedom and knowledge we push apart Rangi and Papa and wonder why everything turns cold. So what is wrong with the cold?
Kluback (1997) is fascinated by Cioran’s comment that ‘life is death’s prisoner’. He wonders if we should also be able to reverse the proposition as well. He thinks that if we say that death is life’s prisoner we can suggest that one day the prisoner will overthrow the guard and destroy him. It is inevitable that death will catch life off guard, strangling and destroying him and emerging victorious. To create another analogy, we could say that life is a fugitive on the run from the lawman called death. Life’s crime is that he exists, and death strives to box him in. When life knows about death his movements are restricted. Death thus imposes restrictions and limits the freedom of life until he has nowhere left to run. Analogies are fun, but do they give us anything?
— from On On the Heights of the Despair by Glenn Mason-Riseborough
(http://www.geocities.com/griseborough/18.htm)
