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No, no, no... you've got it all wrong... you can't act death. The fact of it is nothing to do with seeing it happen — -it's not gasps and blood and falling about — -that isn't what makes it death. It's just a man failing to reappear, that's all — -now you see him, now you don't, that the only thing that's real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming back — -an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.

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To find out actually what takes place when you die you must
die. This isn't a joke. You must die - not physically but
psychologically, inwardly, die to the things you have cherished and
to the things you are bitter about. If you have died to one of your
pleasures, the smallest or the greatest, naturally, without any
enforcement or argument, then you will know what it means to die.
To die is to have a mind that is completely empty of itself, empty
of its daily longing, pleasure; and agonies. Death is a renewal, a
mutation, in which thought does not function at all because thought
is old. When there is death there is something totally new. Freedom
from the known is death, and then you are living.

<i>we disappear.
It happens to me frequently. You disappear? Yes and then come back.
Moments of death I call them.</i>

A man says he is dead but he is alive. But his 'truth' is that he is dead. He expresses it perhaps in the only way common (i.e. the communal) sense allows him. He means that he is 'really' and quite 'literally' dead, not merely symbolically or 'in a sense' or 'as it were', and is seriously bent on communicating his truth. [...] He either is God, or the Devil, or in hell, estranged from God. When someone says he is an unreal man or that he is dead, in all seriousness, expressing in radical terms the stark truth of his existence as he experiences it, that is - insanity. [...] What is required of us? Understand him? [...] As long as we are sane and he is insane, it will remain so. [...] We have to recognize all the time his distinctiveness and differentness, his separateness and loneliness and despair.

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Maybe he was dead and this island was purgatory from which he could only watch the souls of the more deserving go shuttling past to their various Edens. What is death, after all, but a cessation of involvement with the world, a departure from those you love, and those who love you?

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