“I don’t recall who said it, that a corpse is all-powerful, afraid of no one. All the living want and ever hope to achieve the dead already have–complete peace, total independence. There were times when I was terrified of death. You couldn’t mention the word in my presence. When I bought a newspaper, I quickly skipped over the obituaries. The notion that I would one day stop eating, breathing, thinking, reading, seemed so horrible that nothing in life agreed with me any more. Then gradually I began to make peace with the concept of death, and more than that–death became the solution to all problems, actually my ideal. Today when I’m brought the newspapers I quickly turn to the obituaries. When I read that someone has died, I envy him. The reasons I don’t commit suicide are first, Haiml–I want to go together with him–and second, death is too important to absorb all at once. It is like a precious wine to be savored slowly. Those who commit suicide want to escape death once and for all. But those who aren’t cowards learn to enjoy its taste.”
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shosha