Death, destruction of the vital organs so that they cannot be revived.

Birth is but a step towards this destruction:

At the moment the foetus is formed, bodily life does not yet exist or is almost nothing, as one of the greatest geniuses of the Academy of Sciences [Buffon] has observed. Little by little, life increases and extends; it acquires substance as the body grows, develops and gains strength; as soon as it begins to decline, the quantity of life diminishes; finally, when it becomes bent, dry and collapses, life withers, contracts and is reduced almost to nothing. We begin to live by degrees, and we finish dying like we begin to live. All the causes of decline continually act on our material being and bring it little by little to dissolution. Death , this striking change of state, which is so feared, is in nature only the last nuance of a previous being; this necessary phase of our bodies’ withering away is brought about like all the others that preceded it. Life starts to be extinguished long before it goes out completely; and in fact, there is perhaps a greater distance from old age to youth than from decrepitude to death; for we should not consider life here as an absolute, but as a quantity that can increase, diminish and finally arrive at its necessary destruction.

The thought of this destruction is like a light in the middle of the night that spreads its flames on the objects it will soon consume. We must get used to contemplating this light, since it announces nothing that has not been prepared by all that comes before; and since death is as natural as life, why should be so afraid of it? Here I am not addressing evil or immoral people; I know of no remedies that can soothe the torments of their consciences. The wisest of men was right to say that if we could open up the soul of a tyrant, we would find it pierced with deep wounds and torn by blackness and cruelty, like so many mortal injuries. Neither pleasures, nor greatness, nor solitude could preserve Tiberius from the horrible torments he endured. But I would like to arm all honest people against the fantasies of pain and anguish of the last period of life—a general prejudice that has been fought by the eloquent and profound author of the natural history of man [Buffon].

The true philosophy, he says, is to see things as they really are. Our inner feelings would agree with this philosophy, if they were not perverted by the illusions of our imagination and by the unfortunate habit we have adopted of forging mental phantoms of pleasure and pain. Things are only pleasant or frightening from far away, but to be convinced of this, we need the wisdom and the courage to look at them close up. If we ask city doctors and ministers of the church, who are used to observing the actions of the dying, and who have heard their last words, they will agree that with the exception of a small number of chronically sick people, whose agitation, caused by convulsive movements, seems to indicate that they are suffering, in all other cases, people die peacefully and painlessly. And even those terrible agonies frighten the people present more than they torment the sick person; for how many people have we not seen who, after having survived this last extremity, have lost all memory of what had happened and what they felt: they had truly ceased to be for themselves at the time, since they had to wipe from the number of their days all those they spent in that state, of which they no longer had any idea.

It might be thought that the most horrible sufferings of death would exist in an army camp, yet people who have seen thousands of soldiers die in military hospitals report that their lives end so calmly that it is as if death had only passed a noose around their necks, which is all the less tight since it acts like a soothing narcotic. Painful deaths are thus very rare and almost all the others are imperceptible.

When the scythe of fate is raised to cut off our days, we do not see it, we do not feel it strike—the scythe, did I say? A poetic illusion! Death is not armed with a sharp instrument, no violence comes with it, we finish living by imperceptible degrees. The exhaustion of our forces nullifies all feeling and excites only a vague sensation in us that we feel when we give ourselves up to a vague reverie. From a distance, we fear this state, since we project ourselves into it, but when it arrives we have been weakened by the gradual steps leading up to it, and the decisive moment comes without our suspecting it and without our thinking about it. This is how most human beings die, and among the small number who remain conscious until their last breath, there is perhaps not a single one who does not, at the same time, still retain hope and who does not persuade himself that he will return to life. For the happiness of mankind, nature has made this feeling stronger than reason; and if we did not awaken terror by the sad attentions and mournful ceremonies that precede death in society, we would not see it coming. Why do the sons of Asclepius not try to find a way to let people die in peace? Epicurus and Antoninus Pius were able to find ways, but our doctors are too much like our judges who, after pronouncing a death sentence, deliver the victim to his pain, to priests and to the lamentations of his family. What else is needed to anticipate the agony?

An individual who had been cut off early on from relations with other people, and who had no way of understanding his origins, would believe not only that he had not been born, but even that his life would have no end. The deaf man from Chartres who saw his fellow men and women die, did not know what death was. A savage who saw none of his own kind die, would believe he was immortal. So we only fear death so much because of habit, education and prejudice.

But the greatest alarm reigns mainly in people who have lived in the world, in our cities, and whose education has made them more sensitive than others, since the common people, especially in the countryside, look on death without fear; death is the end of the sadness and the calamities of the poor. Death, said Cato, can never be premature for a consul, regrettable or dishonourable for a good man or unhappy for a wise man.

Nothing violent accompanies old age; the senses are dazed and the body’s vessels become obliterated, stuck together and ossified one after the other; then life ceases little by little; we feel ourselves die like we feel we go to sleep: we decline into weakness. Augustus called this death euthanasia ; an expression that had some success in Rome, and which authors have used ever since in their works.

It seems we pay a greater tribute of pain when we come into the world than when we leave it: in the first case, the baby cries, in the second, the old man sighs. At least it is true that we leave this world as we come into it, without knowing it. Death and love are consumed by the same means, by exhalation. We reproduce ourselves when it is from love that we die; when we become nothing (I am only speaking about the body, so let no one accuse me of materialism) it is by the shears of Atropos. Let us thank nature, which has granted the liveliest pleasures to the reproduction of our species, and almost always takes the edge off the sensation of pain, in the moments when it cannot keep us alive.

Death is thus not as terrible as we think. From far off we are poor judges of it; it is a spectre that strikes us with terror from a distance and that disappears when we come closer to it. We only form false ideas about it; we look at it not only as the greatest misfortune, but also as an evil accompanied by the most horrible anguish. We even try to increase its dire image in our imagination, and to increase our fears by reasoning about the nature of its pains. But nothing is more ill founded; since what can produce or give rise to it? Shall we say that pain resides in the soul or in the body? The pain of the soul can only be produced by thinking, and the pain of the body is always in proportion to the body’s strength or weakness. In the instant of natural death , the body is weaker than ever, so it can only feel very little pain, if it even feels any.

Men fear death like children fear the dark, and only because their imaginations have been alarmed by ghosts that are as empty as they are frightening. All the ceremony of last farewells, the tears of our friends, mourning and the ceremony of the funeral, the convulsions of the body approaching dissolution—this is what tends to frighten us.

The Stoics feigned to prepare too much for these last moments. They used too many consolations to sweeten the loss of life. All these remedies against the fear of death only help redouble it in our hearts. When life is called a continual preparation for death, then we may well see it as a very fearsome enemy, since we are told to arm ourselves against it from head to foot; and yet this enemy is nothing. Why should we apprehend it so much? In the end, why should we fear death when we have lived good enough lives not to fear what comes afterwards?