When there is no balm in Gilead, sleep

Sleep, that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care;

The birth of each day's life, sore labour's bath,

Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,

Chief nourisher in life's feast.

-- William Shakespeare, Macbeth

What's in your soup?

Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips;

Finger of birth-strangled babe,

Ditch-delivered by a drab;

Make the gruel thick and slab.

 

-- William Shakespeare, Macbeth

The lighted fool

 

 

The queen, my lord, is dead.

MACBETH
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. ...

"This too shall pass" has its own Anglo-Saxon history, independent of the "Persian"

Come what come may,

Time and the hour run through the roughest day.

-- William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 3

Many of us have heard that the Geat's love for Maethild passed all bounds, that his love robbed him of his sleep.

That went away, this also may.

-- The Lament of Deor, late 10th century Exeter Book

The Solitary End: Can You Handle The Truth?

Well, no matter. You will handle it all the same.

A fellow traveler to the grave captures it beautifully:

From the moment we are born, the possibilities ahead of us contract. Each moment sets one on a path which eliminates all other possible paths. Life is one giant contraction. To decide to go one way means one can never go on the other journeys available at that moment. If one decides, at age eighteen, to go to NC State University, to use an example, one eliminates all the other roads for life and spouses and jobs and experience which would have led through, say, UNC-Chapel Hill or Duke or Clemson. This is true for every single day of our lives.

As one ages, this awareness becomes particularly acute. The contraction becomes palpable. One begins to see in one's sights the pinpoint toward which all our days are converging. The number of decisions one still has to make in the future dwindles. The contraction continues until at the moment of death the self becomes a single point of consciousness. One must at the end let go of all family, friends, and all outside experience itself so that one becomes a solitary self. Finally even that point of light is darkened. The almost infinite possibilities present at birth end at that one dot.  

This awareness of mortality is not simply the awareness that somewhere in the distant future there will be an end. We experience the loss every day.  The contraction is continuous. The passing of time is nothing other than the experience of death. Loss and memory and longing are a form of the grave. We feel it when we look at baby pictures of long grown children or see a snapshot of a movie theatre in our youth that was torn down decades earlier. Nostalgia is mourning. Death is not a moment one encounters at the end of life. It is a condition one lives in. Mortality, the condition of being subject to death, pervades our creaturely existence. It is the sea in which we swim.

Read more from this wise man, Paul Gregory Alms, at http://lrast.blogspot.com/2010/08/mortality-thrash-metal-and-church-by.html .


It reminded me of Shakespeare's Macbeth, Act Five, Scene Five, here, where each tomorrow creeps in to the last, becoming shadowy yesterdays of nothing:

SEYTON
The queen, my lord, is dead.


MACBETH
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.