The Voices in My Head

“How do we know the dead long for life? Perhaps death is to awake from a dream, and we cannot remember why we lived at all?”

So what is death? Certainly, it ends all social contact with the living, barring a few incidents with psychic mediums and the like. But what else is there? Shakespear wrote “to sleep, perchance to dream”. He was talking of the idea of giving up on the great struggle that is life, to willing stop living. Whether he meant death by your own hand, assisted death, or simply giving up, is unclear, but with those words it seems to me the character was contemplating death as a peaceful end to the struggles and trauma that face us in our daily lives. And certainly we do face such slings and arrows.

This is kind of opposite to what Zhuang Zi said. Zhuang was of the opinion that death is like waking up, which is the complete opposite of what the Bard of Avon said. Who is right? There’s only one way to find out.

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