Death

Addendum: See also Plato on death here.

When I was at school, an English teacher quoted a poem which described sleep as "...our little daily death..." The teacher asked, "Why do we fear death? We do it - lose consciousness - every day." Of course we expect to wake up again but that thought is usually not in our minds on those all too familiar occasions when we have become so tired that we just want to relax, to rest and to become unconscious as quickly as possible. Perhaps someone who is very old reflects as he falls asleep that he might not wake up again and really does not mind? (CS Lewis, not expected by a doctor to regain consciousness, did wake up and asked for a cup of tea!)

Sometimes the feeling of not only not fearing but even welcoming death is expressed in fiction and literature. We find it in Poul Anderson, in Stieg Larsson and in Robert Louis Stevenson quoted by Robert Heinlein.

"He was not afraid to die, he thought sickly, he would welcome the darkness when it came -..."

-"Terminal Quest," p. 11.

(It was this opening part of a single sentence that occasioned the present post although, as sometimes happens, it has led us to longer quotations from other authors.)

"I have to sleep for a while, she thought. And suddenly she realized that if she closed her eyes and let go there was a good chance she would never wake up again. She analyzed this conclusion and gradually came to understand that she did not care. On the contrary. She felt, stealthily, attracted by the thought. To rest. To not wake up."

-Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played With Fire (London, 2009), CHAPTER 32, p. 565.

When this character, Lisbeth Salander, has regained consciousness after an operation to remove a low-caliber bullet from just inside the back of her skull:

"She was surprised to be alive. Yet she felt indifferent. If death was the black emptiness from which she had just woken up, then death was nothing to worry about. She would hardly notice the difference. With which esoteric thought she closed here eyes and fell asleep again."

-Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest (London, 2010), CHAPTER 3, p. 61.

Stevenson wrote a poem called "Requiem," which Heinlein quoted at the end of a Future History short story entitled "Requiem":

Under the wide and starry sky,
    Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
    And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
    Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
    And the hunter home from the hill.

This poem is in the public domain.

-copied from here.