Like photographs of lost loved ones on the wall, we're already dead, we just don't know it yet. Encoded is our use by date to procreate & die.
To fight?
"Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light"*
Or not? For it is our lot. To fight? Or accept our plight? To be, or not to be? Despite all our might, we are shadows to the night. So breathe, just breathe until tomorrow, accept your fate then dream farewell forever. Dust in the wind again, for only in death are we truly free. And within one hundred years, it won't matter.
It's easier to accept fate than it is to fight the inevitable.
*'Do not go gentle into that good night', Extract of the poem by Dylan Thomas 1914-53.
Every generation
Generations come and go, each lives, dies and passes their baton to the next. An endless march of death. The lives from countless generations all lost for evolution.
The evolution of a species whose progeny might one day save itself from planetary extinction and might even become gods.
Would this progeny think of us, as we think of our ape ancestors? Will the sacrifice of so many generations be worth it?
Our short lives seem so long, real and tactile, but they are bookended by eternal nothingness.
MUSIC
Do not go gentle into that good night, Dylan Thomas 1951
Atmosphères, György Ligeti 1961
REFERENCE LINKS
Do not go gentle into that good night, Dylan Thomas 1951 (poem)
For the Fallen, Laurence Binyon 1914
The Charge of the Light Brigade, Tennyson 1854
Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, Francis Bacon 1953