e in
pain than to cease to be in peace. The truth is that I could not
believe in this atrocity of Hell, of an eternity of punishment, nor did
I see any more real hell than nothingness and the prospect of it. And I
continue in the belief that if we all believed in our salvation from
nothingness we should all be better.

What is this _joie de vivre_ that they talk about nowadays? Our hunger
for God, our thirst of immortality, of survival, will always stifle in
us this pitiful enjoyment of the life that passes and abides not. It is
the frenzied love of life, the love that would have life to be unending,
that most often urges us to long for death. "If it is true that I am to
die utterly," we say to ourselves, "then once I am annihilated the world
has ended so far as I am concerned--it is finished. Why, then, should it
not end forthwith, so that no new consciousnesses, doomed to suffer the
tormenting illusion of a transient and apparential existence, may come
into being? If, the illusion of living being shattered, living for the
mere sake of living or for the sake of others who are likewise doomed to
die, does not satisfy the soul, what is the good of living? Our best
remedy is death." And thus it is that we chant the praises of the
never-ending rest because of our dread of it, and speak of liberating
death.

Leopardi, the poet of sorrow, of annihilation, having lost the ultimate
illusion, that of believing in his immortality--

_Peri l'inganno estremo
ch'eterno io mi credei_,

spoke to his heart of _l'infinita vanita del tutto_, and perceived how
close is the kinship between love and death, and how "when love is born
deep down in the heart, simultaneously a languid and weary desire to die
is felt in the breast." The greater part of those who seek death at
their own hand are moved thereto by love; it is the supreme longing for
life, for more life, the longing to prolong and perpetuate life, that
urges them to death, once they are persuaded of the vanity of this
longing.

The problem is tragic and eternal, and the more we seek to escape from
it, the more it thrusts itself upon us. Four-and-twenty centuries ago,
in his dialogue on the immortality of the soul, the serene Plato--but
was he serene?--spoke of the uncertainty of our dream of being immortal
and of the _risk_ that the dream might be vain, and from his own soul
there escaped this profound cry--Glorious is the risk!--_kalos
gar o kindunos_, glorious