Tag Archives: death

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DEATH and REBIRTH

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Jiddu Krishnamurti  — (11 May 1895 – 17 February 1986) was a speaker and writer on philosophical and spiritual subjects. In his early life he was groomed to be the new World Teacher but later rejected this mantle and withdrew from the organization behind it.  He claimed allegiance to no nationality, caste, religion, or philosophy, and spent the rest of his life traveling the world, speaking to large and small groups and individuals. He wrote many books, among them The First and Last Freedom, The Only Revolution, and Krishnamurti’s Notebook.

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MARK TWAIN: THOUGHTS ABOUT DEATH

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MARK TWAIN on death

Death is the starlit strip between the companionship of yesterday and the reunion of tomorrow.
– on monument erected to Mark Twain & Ossip Gabrilowitsch

All say, “How hard it is that we have to die”– a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
– The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy of the Extraordinary Twins

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.
– The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy of the Extraordinary Twins

The Impartial Friend: Death, the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all–the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved.
– Mark Twain, last written statement; Moments with Mark Twain, Paine

Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.
– Following the Equator

Death, the refuge, the solace, the best and kindliest and most prized friend and benefactor of the erring, the forsaken, the old and weary and broken of heart.
– Adam speech, 1883

Life was not a valuable gift, but death was. Life was a fever-dream made up of joys embittered by sorrows, pleasure poisoned by pain; a dream that was a nightmare-confusion of spasmodic and fleeting delights, ecstasies, exultations, happinesses, interspersed with long-drawn miseries, griefs, perils, horrors, disappointments, defeats,humiliations, and despairs–the heaviest curse devisable by divine ingenuity; but death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man’s best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.
– Letters from the Earth

Manifestly, dying is nothing to a really great and brave man.
– Letter to Olivia Clemens, 7/1/1885 (referring to General Grant)

How lovely is death; and how niggardly it is doled out.
– Letter to Olivia Clemens, 8/19/1896

It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man’s meat is inferior to pork.
– More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927

[I am] not sorry for anybody who is granted the privilege of prying behind the curtain to see if there is any contrivance that is half so shabby and poor and foolish as the invention of mortal life.
– Letter to Mary Mason Fairbanks, 1894

I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead–and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead, and they would be honest so much earlier.
– Mark Twain in Eruption

To die one’s self is a thing that must be easy, & light of consequence; but to lose a part of one’s self–well, we know how deep that pang goes, we who have suffered that disaster, received that wound which cannot heal.
– Letter to Will Bowen, 11/4/1888

Favored above Kings and Emperors is the stillborn child.
– Notebook, #42 1898

All people have had ill luck, but Jairus’s daughter & Lazarus the worst.
– Notebook #42, 1898

No real estate is permanently valuable but the grave.
– Notebook #42, 1898

Death is so kind, so benignant, to whom he loves; but he goes by us others & will not look our way.
– Letter to W. D. Howells, 12/20/1898

A distinguished man should be as particular about his last words as he is about his last breath. He should write them out on a slip of paper and take the judgment of his friends on them. He should never leave such a thing to the last hour of his life, and trust to an intellectual spurt at the last moment to enable him to say something smart with his latest gasp and launch into eternity with grandeur.
– “The Last Words of Great Men”, 1869

Death….a great Leveler — a king before whose tremendous majesty shades & differences in littleness cannot be discerned — an Alp from whose summit all small things are the same size.
– Letter to Olivia Clemens, 10/15/1871

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DEATH FAIRY

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The job of a Death Fairy is a thankless task, but somebody must do it!

death fairyA banshee (“woman of the sídhe, woman of the fairy mounds”) is a female spirit in Irish mythology, who heralds the death of a member of one of the prominent Gaelic families.   The banshee is often described in Gaelic lore as wearing red or green, usually with long, disheveled hair. She can appear in a variety of forms. Perhaps most often she is seen as an ugly, frightful hag, but she can also appear as young and beautiful if she chooses. In some tales, the figure who first appears to be a banshee or other cailleach (hag) is later revealed to be the Irish battle goddess, the Morrígan.

One popular belief was that they were the dead. This noted that many common points of belief, such as the same legends being told of ghosts and fairies, the sídhe in actuality being burial mounds, it being dangerous to eat food in both Fairyland and Hades, and both the dead and fairies living underground. Diane Purkiss observes an equating of fairies with the untimely dead who left “unfinished lives”.

Another belief is that the fairies were an intelligent species, distinct from humans and angels. In alchemy in particular they were regarded as elementals, such as gnomes and sylphs, as described by Paracelsus. This is uncommon in folklore, but accounts describing the fairies as “spirits of the air” have been found. 

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DREAMS: ELSEWHERE OR NOWHERE

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When you sleep, YOU may be elsewhere or nowhere…. 
Sleeping Beauty
“The acute phase announced itself by nightmares of a grotesque and terrifying and premonitory nature. Miss R. had a series of dreams about one central theme: she dreamed she was imprisoned in an inaccessible castle, but the castle had the form and shape of herself; she dreamed of enchantments, bewitchment, entrancement; she dreamed that she had become a living, sentient statue of stone; she dreamed that the world had come to a stop; she dreamed that she had fallen into a sleep so deep that nothing could wake her; she dreamed of a death which was different from death.”   ~ Oliver Sacks, describing the symptoms experienced by Rose R., a patient who fell ill with Encephalitis Lethargica (Sleepy Sickness), from Awakenings. Later in the text, Rose R. is described as “…she was simply — elsewhere (or nowhere).”PAINTING:  Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898),  The Sleeping Beauty, 1870-1873

Dream of girl before sunrise - Karl Briullov