Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings.

How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.

If people knew the story of their lives, how many would then elect to live them?

The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them.

They trekked out along the crescent sweep of beach, keeping to the firmer sand below the tidewrack. They stood, their clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust. The bones of seabirds. At the tideline a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as the eye could see like an isocline of death. One vast salt sepulchre. Senseless. Senseless.

But I didn't know what to say to him. What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything?

Every man's death is standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love the man who stands for us.