He who suffers lives,
and he who lives suffering, even though over the portal of his abode is
written "Abandon all hope!" loves and hopes. It is better to live in
pain than to cease to be in peace. The truth is that I could not
believe in this atrocity of Hell, of an eternity of punishment, nor did
I see any more real hell than nothingness and the prospect of it. And I
continue in the belief that if we all believed in our salvation from
nothingness we should all be better.
What is this _joie de vivre_ that they talk about nowadays? Our hunger
for God, our thirst of immortality, of survival, will always stifle in
us this pitiful enjoyment of the life that passes and abides not. It is
the frenzied love of life, the love that would have life to be unending,
that most often urges us to long for death. "If it is true that I am to
die utterly," we say to ourselves, "then once I am annihilated the world
has ended so far as I am concerned--it is finished. Why, then, should it
not end forthwith, so that no new consciousnesses, doomed to suffer the
tormenting illusion of a transient and apparential existence, may come
into being? If, the illusion of living being shattered, living for the
mere sake of living or for the sake of others who are likewise doomed to
die, does not satisfy the soul, what is the good of living? Our best
remedy is death." And thus it is that we chant the praises of the
never-ending rest because of our dread of it, and speak of liberating
death.
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