Death is the fact that ecological thought must encounter

A rigid and thin concept of Life is what dark ecology rejects. That concept can only mean one thing: all three axioms of agrilogistics are in play. Life is the ultimate noncontradictory Easy Think Substance that we must have more and more of, for no reason. A future society in which being ecological became a mode of violence still more horrifying than the neoliberalism that now dominates Earth would consist of a vigorous insistence on Life and related categories such as health.  It would make the current control society (as Foucault calls it) look like an anarchist picnic. If that is what future coexistnce means, beam me up Scotty. The widescreen view of dark ecology sees lifeforms as specters in a charnel ground in which Life is a narrow metaphysical concrete pipe. Death is the fact that ecological thought must encounter to stay soft, to stay weird.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) pp. 137-138

Most of our vices are attempted short cuts to love

In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden (Penguin Books, 2000) p. 505

Människan bland andra människor det är just människans själ

Men hela tiden är det ett och samma oändligt likartade liv som uppfyller universum och som varje timme förnyas i otaliga föreningar och omvandlingar. Ni är rädd att ni inte ska uppstå från de döda, men ni uppstod redan när ni föddes, utan att ni lade märke till det.

Kommer ni att plågas? Kommer vävnaderna att känna av sitt sönderfall? Det vill med andra ord säga: hur kommer det att gå med ert medvetande? Men vad är medvetandet? Låt oss undersöka den saken. Att medvetet vilja somna innebär verklig sömnlöshet, att medvetet försöka känna sina egna matsmältningsorgan arbeta, det innebär en verklig störning a deras innervation. Medvetandet är ett gift, ett medel till självförgiftning av det subjekt som inriktar det på sig själv. Medvetandet är ett ljus som går i dagen, medvetandet lyser upp vägen framför oss så att vi inte ska snubbla. Medvetandet är de tända lyktorna på ett lokomotiv i rörelse. Rikta dess ljus inåt så inträffar en katastrof.

Hur går det med ert medvetande? Ert. Ert. Vad är ni? Däri ligger knuten. Låt oss reda ut den saken. Hur uppfattar ni er själv, vad är det för del av er som ni är medveten om? Är det njurarna, levern, blodkärlen? Nej, så långt ni kan erinra er har ni alltid bestämt er själv genom era verksamhetsyttringar utom er själv, i familjen, bland främmande människor eller genom era händers verk. Låt oss se närmare på detta. Människan bland andra människor det är just människans själ. Detta är vad ni är, det är i dettas ert medvetande har andats, det är därav det har närt sig, har berusat sig hela livet. Er själ, er odödlighet, ert liv finns hos andra. Än sen? Hos andra har ni varit, hos andra ska ni förbliva. Och vad gör det för skillnad för er, att detta sedan kommer att kallas minne. Detta är ni, sådan ni ingår i det varav framtiden skall bestå.

Boris Pasternak, Doktor Zjivago (1958) p. 75

If death be anything at all beyond a brief and peculiar emotional state of the bereaved

Miss Rosa Coldfield was buried yesterday. She remained in the coma for almost two weeks and two days ago she died without regaining consciousness and without pain they say, and whatever they mean by that since it has always seemed to me that the only painless death must be that which takes the intelligence by violent surprise and from the rear so to speak, since if death be anything at all beyond a brief and peculiar emotional state of the bereaved it must be a brief and likewise peculiar state of the subject as well. And if aught can be more painful to any intelligence above that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual confronting with that which over a long period of bewilderment and dread it has been taught to regard as an irrevocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it.

William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (Vintage, 2005) pp. 173-174

God is a brain mutation

Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, "I'll be dead," you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul – it was a consequence of grammar. And so was God, because as soon as there's a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back in time until you get to I don't know, and that's what God is. It's what you don't know – the dark, the hidden, the underside of the visible, and all because we have grammar, and grammar would be impossible without the FoxP2 gene; so God is a brain mutation, and that gene is the same one birds need for singing. So music is built in, Glenn said: it's knitted into us. It would be very hard to amputate it because it's an essential part of us, like water.

Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (Virago Press, 2010) p. 377

Death nibbles at everything

Let's get beyond. Everything passes; 'all is vanity and vexation of spirit': we'll be past all this some day. We'll have got beyond the camps, and we'll have got beyond my own existence. It's laughable, this little ephemeral life brooding over those camps which the future had already abolished! History takes care of itself and each one of us into the bargain. Let's just keep quiet, them, each in his own little hole.

Well, then, why don't they keep quiet? That's the question I asked Robert more than twenty years ago, when I was a student. He laughed at me, but I'm not sure today that he ever completely convinced me. They pretended to believe that humanity is a single, immortal person, that one day it will be rewarded for all its sacrifices, and that I, myself, will receive my due. But I don't accept that: death nibbles at everything. The sacrificed generations won't rise from their graves to take part in the final love feasts; what might console them is that the chosen ones will join them under the earth at the end of a very brief interval spent above it. Between happiness and unhappiness, there isn't perhaps as much difference as one might think.

[...]

'I was thinking today that people are really wrong to torment themselves over anything and everything. Things are never as important as they seem; they change, they end, and above all, when all is said and done, everyone dies. That settles everything.'

'That's just a way of escaping from problems,' Robert said.

I cut him off. 'Unless it's that problems are a way of escaping the truth. Of course,' I added, 'when you've decided that it's life that's real, the idea of death seems like escape. But conversely...'

Robert shook his head. 'There's a difference. The fact of living proves that you've chosen to believe in life; if one honestly believes that death alone is real, then one should kill oneself. Actually, though, even suicides don't think that.'

'It may be that people go on living simply because they're scatterbrained and cowardly,' I said. 'It's easier that way. But that doesn't prove anything either.'

'First of all, it's important that suicide be difficult,' Robert said. 'And then continuing to live isn't only continuing to breathe. No one ever succeeds in settling down in complete apathy. You like certain things, you hate others, you become indignant, you admire – all of which implies that you recognize the values of life.'

Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005) pp. 432-433

Stanza of the ternary dance

Life is a ternary movement far from equilibrium.
‘We parasite each other and live among parasites’.

We inhabit the perennial genesis: — natura naturans, the never-ending chain of organisms devouring one other right down to the invisible ones:

‘The fruit spoils, the milk sours, the wine turns into vinegar, the vegetables rot... Everything ferments, everything rots, everything changes’.

Microorganisms take our dead body back to the soil — putrefaction is still life.

Wietske Maas & Matteo Pasquinelli, 'Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism' at http://urbanibalism.org/Manifesto_Urban_Cannibalism_Berlin_notes.pdf (2013) p. 6

Time would always slay the messenger

He said that in his opinion it was imprudent to suppose that the dead have no power to act in the world, for their power is great and their influence often most weighty with just those who suspect it least. He said that what men do not understand is that what the dead have quit is itself no world but is also only the picture of the world in men's hearts. He said that the world cannot be quit for it is eternal in whatever form as are all things within it. In those faces that shall now be forever nameless among their outworn chattels there is writ a message that can never be spoken because time would always slay the messenger before he could ever arrive.

Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (Picador, 2011) pp. 424-425

The way to see how beautiful life is

"If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance – interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death."
"That's all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon – I don't want it! But I'm not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say O lovely! I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don't give a hoot for eternity."
"It's nothing to do with eternity," said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. "All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?"

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossed (Gollancz, 2002) p. 158

Time itself has been non-concurrent over the centuries and the millennia

In what way do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it? Why do we show the hours of light and darkness in the same circle? Why does time stand still and motionless in one place, and rush headlong by in another? Could we not claim, said Austerlitz, that time itself has been non-concurrent over the centuries and the millennia? It is not so long ago, after all, that it began spreading out over everything. And is not human life in many parts of the earth governed to this day less by time than by the weather, and thus by an unquantifiable dimension which disregards linear regularity, does not progress constantly forward but moves in eddies, is marked by episodes of congestion and irruption, recurs in ever-changing form, and evolves in no one knows what direction? Even in a metropolis ruled by time like London, said Austerlitz, it is still possible to be outside time, a state of affairs which until recently was almost as common in backward and forgotten areas of our own country as it used to be in the undiscovered continents overseas. The dead are outside time, the dying and all the sick at home or in hospitals, and they are not the only ones, for a certain degree of personal misfortune is enough to cut us off from the past and the future.

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Penguin Books, 2002) pp. 142-143

We manufacture realities

We generally give to our ideas about the unknown the colour of our notions about what we do know: if we call death a sleep it's because it has the appearance of sleep; if we call death a new life, it's because it seems different from life. We build our beliefs and hopes out of these small misunderstandings with reality and live off husks of bread that we call cakes, the way poor children play at being happy.

But that's how all of life is; at least that's how the particular way of life generally known as civilization is. Civilization consists in giving an inappropriate name to something and then dreaming what results from that. And in fact the false name and the true dream do create a new reality. The object really does become other, because we have made it so. We manufacture realities. We use the raw materials we always used but the form lent it by art effectively prevents it from remaining the same. A table made out of pinewood is a pinetree but also a table.We sit down at the table, not at the pinetree. Although love is a sexual instinct, we do not love with that instinct, rather we presuppose the existence of another feeling, and that presupposition is, effectively, another feeling.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Serpent's Tail, 1991) p. 53

The difference is in the touching

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (HarperVoyager, 2008) pp. 200-201

Doomed by hope

"Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere thought of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac. A dog or a rabbit doesn't behave like that. Take birds – in a lean season they cut down on their eggs, or they won't mate at all. They put their energy into staying alive themselves until times get better. But human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever."
"As a species we're doomed by hope, then?"
"You could call it hope. That, or desperation."
"But we're doomed without hope, as well," said Jimmy.
"Only as individuals," said Crake cheerfully.

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (Virago Press, 2004) p. 139

My thought of death

For I think myself as mortal only if I think that my death has no need of my thought of death in order to be actual. If my ceasing to be depended upon my continuing to be so that I could keep thinking myself as not being, then I would continue to agonize indefinitely, without ever actually passing away.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 57

The absence of any reason for my being

Even if I cannot think of myself, for example, as annihilated, neither can I think of any cause that would rule out this eventuality. The possibility of my not being is thinkable as the counterpart of the absence of any reason for my being, even if I cannot think what it would be not to be. [...] For even if I cannot think the unthinkable, I can think the possibility of the unthinkable by dint of the unreason of the real.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 56

Time empty and out of joint

Time empty and out of joint, with its rigorous formal and static order, its crushing unity and its irreversible series, is precisely the death instinct.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 136

Life is a serious disorder

I know that we are morose, crypt-faced, inclined to the view that life is a serious disorder which ultimately proves fatal.

Flann O'Brien, The Best of Myles (Picador, 1977) p. 360

Death is a process

The kernel of the legal impasse appears to be this – that life is not in law the opposite of death, nor is being born the opposite of dying. Death is a process, resulting usually in a serious fatality.

Flann O'Brien, The Best of Myles (Picador, 1977) p. 160

The ultimate meaning

Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 259

The benign indifference of the world

For the first time in a very long time I thought of mother. I felt that I understood why at the end of her life she'd taken a 'fiancé' and why she'd pretended to start again. There at the home, where lives faded away, there too the evenings were a kind of melancholy truce. So close to death, mother must have felt liberated and ready to live her life again. No one, no one at all had any right to cry over her. And I too felt ready to live my life again. As if this great outburst of anger had purged all my ills, killed all my hopes, I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world. And finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I'd been happy, and that I was still happy.

Albert Camus, The Outsider (Penguin Modern Classics, 2000) p. 117