Between Thought And Action

It’s quite amusing how you sympathize so much with life and death, to the extent I don’t really know which one you prefer.

Well, off course, there are moral corollaries that imply each phenomenon. Is it righteous to endure life, those ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,’ rather than actively seek to end that suffering? To me, death is like sleeping. When you die, you conclude that agony and woe that life means. By dying, we are no longer uncertain, and we end ‘The heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,’ and therefore, suicide is a desirable action for men.

But apparently, you are not only concerned with the choice of living or dying. You mention the action of suicide to being ‘a consummation devoutly to be wished,’ what do you mean by this?

Afterlife. We die, then what happens? Just as we sleep, what happens when we sleep? We dream. As we dream in death, daunting images appear in our perception, and these ‘must give us pause’. Then, if death can be a bed of roses, and life be a path of misery, why should man bear melancholy ‘when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin?’ Essentially, nobody would choose to live, however, people fear death, and while this remains constant, they will prefer to live rather than confronting a hypothetical more miserable fate that might be afterlife. This fear of afterlife leads mankind to a state of moral sensitivity, and ‘thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the naïve hue of resolution, is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.’ Hence, in the end, we live life with fear of the misery we might confront, that fear that our thoughts build upon our head. And we live in an ambivalent dilemma between thought and action. But anyways, I find it frustrating, still, not to know what to do, ‘to be or not to be.’

Well, I really hope you’re able to find the answer to that question.

Oh, thank you! But really, when I do, everybody will. I’m not only thinking for myself.