Death or Life?

“A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they've all let him down.” (Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down)

There are times when patience and contemplative quiet wear thin, when despair and rage and tedium combine to overthrow the settled mind and to torture the tired heart.  When one wearies of the world and those in it . . . when even beauty and art can barely restrain the looming indifference.  Comes down the darkness and Melancholy opens her all too inviting and long familiar bosom . . .

Once you realize that there is no changing the world, and that very few individuals even notice your existence, that the ideals of humanity have little to do with, or effect on, the reality of life on this planet; then what is left?

". . .For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovered country, from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all . . ."

(William Shakespeare, Hamlet)

The embattled seclusion and delusion (for Hamlet really is going mad even while he pretends to play at it) exampled in Shakespeare's play and the questioning of the paradoxes of life is all there is left to the thinking mind, and so our heart must save us.