Fear of annihilation, or of the loss of identity, which is the same
thing, I take to be one of the remaining terrors in European minds
meditating on death. Of all the imagined forms of survival, only one is
obviously more horrible than the night of nothing, and that is the state
in which Beethoven twangs a banjo and Gladstone utters the political
forecasts of a distinguished journalist. It may be that my affection for
the "narrow ego" is too violent, but, for myself, I do not find M.
Maeterlinck's consolations more genuinely consoling than other
philosophy. On the second and far more poignant terror that still
survives in the very nature of death, he hardly touches. I mean the
severance of love, the disappearance of the beloved. "No, no, no life,"
cries Lear:

"Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!"

It is the cry of all mankind when love is thus slit in twain; nor is
sorrow comforted because coral is made of love's bones, or violets
spring from his flesh, and the vanished self is possibly absorbed into
the felicity of an infinite and everlasting azure.

XXXVI

STRULDBRUGS

What a fuss they make, proclaiming the secret of long life! We must stay
abed till noon, they say; we must take life slowly and comfortably; we
must avoid worry, live moderately, drink wine, smoke cigars, and read
the _Times_. Yes; there is one who, in a letter to the _Times_, boasted
his grandfather sustained life for a hundred and one years by reading
all the leading and special articles of that paper; his father got to
eighty-eight on the same diet; himself follows their footsteps on fare
that is new every morning. Another writer has subscribed to the _Times_
for sixty-seven years, and now is ninety-two on the strength of it.
Avoid worry, fret not yourself because of evildoers, let not indignation
lacerate your heart, take the sensible and solid view of things, read
the _Times_, and you will surpass the Psalmist's limit of threescore
years and ten.

What a picture of beneficent comfort it calls up! The breakfast-room
furniture fit to outlast the Pyramids, the maroon leather of deep
armchairs, the marble clock ticking to half-past nine beneath the bronze
figure with the scythe and hourglass, the boots set to warm upon the
hearthrug, the crisp bacon sizzling gently beneath its silver cover, the
pleasant wife murmuring gently behind the s