"I cannot endure doing nothing," [Charles Darwin] told Jenyns in 1877. It was almost as if he feared the moment when his mind might be empty, when his work might be done; and to stave off this abyss constantly found old and new topics to pursue. If not dread of idleness, then dread of decrepitude. He often said that his work made him feel alive, helped his mind sing, was the one thing that blotted out his cares. Although he called himself "a kind of machine for grinding out general laws out of a large collection of facts," the truth was he only felt himself when immersed in some demanding new project.
Quoted in Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (2002), Janet Browne.
A good attitude to take, from the first day of any programming project, is that the system being built is fundamentally flawed and doomed. The goal of such a project, then, is simply to build a system that will last long enough for a better one to come along, and perhaps also to be, for a brief moment suspended between eternities, the best program of its kind yet built.
Programming As If People Mattered
Nun 1: Sir, it is only a play... with music. Do not distress yourself.
Cosimo: It is only a play... with music? Does God say the same at every death? It is only a play... with music? When I die, will someone say the same? He was only a prince. He died. It was only a play... with music.
Nun 2: (Very quietly) Sir, be grateful for the music. Most of us die in silence.
The Baby of Mâcon
And in the end, yes, all we have is the question of whether we go with dignity and honor, knowing that we have lived our lives with passion and compassion in equal measure. For me, that knowledge is enough to sustain me when the game is finally called on account of darkness.
In rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5
To me, the life that we live is heaven. My idea of paradise is life on Earth. But we often don't know it, and can't see it that way, until, I'm sure, we start to leave it.
In a Globe & Mail interview
Now it is time that we were going, I to die and you to live; but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God.
From The Apology, quoting Socrates's final words at his trial
The clarity of Socrates' situation is remarkable. ... his exit is wonderfully seductive. It is calm, clear, convincing. Friends are present, wise words are said, the ethical unfolding of life is tied up in a neat package. And then he slips away, slowly becoming stone-cold from the feet up. It is our fantasy of the normal death, with the addition of social and prophetic implications, to say nothing of heroic proportions. Again, most of us will likely drop dead on a subway platform, in the middle of an orgasm or straining on a toilet seat early in the morning. The real tragedy of death may be just how often it is comic.
On Equilibrium
It is unfortunate, however, that even a well-ordered life cannot lead anybody safely around the inevitable doom that waits in the sky. As F. Hopkinson Smith long ago pointed out, the claw of the sea-puss gets us all in the end.
"Preface to A Life", in The Thurber Carnival
... don't waste too much effort in searching for conspiracies. Most of the harm done in the world is out of stupidity, not by design. Be on the watch for skulduggery... but don't fall into the trap of thinking that every evil thing that occurs in the world in part of some diabolic master plan. The notion that whatever is wrong with the world can be blamed on somebody (never, of course, one's self) is a rather infantile carryover from the childhood days when our parents were thought to be all-powerful and therefore all-responsible.
2081
As I walked out to the plane in the balmy air of a Sydney September night, my mind flew back to the dusty cemetery where my father was buried. Where, I wondered, would my bones come to rest? It pained me to think of them not fertilizing Australian soil. Then I comforted myself with the notion that wherever on the earth was my final resting place, my body would return to the restless red dust of the western plains. I could see how it would blow about and get in people's eyes, and I was content with that.
The Road from Coorain
The principle of maximum diversity operates both at the physical and at the mental level. It says that the laws of nature and the initial conditions are such as to make the universe as interesting as possible. As a result, life is possible but not too easy. Always when things are dull, something new turns up to challenge us and to stop us from settling into a rut. Examples of things which make life difficult are all around us: comet impacts, ice ages, weapons, plagues, nuclear fission, computers, sex, sin and death. Not all challenges can be overcome, and so we have tragedy. Maximum diversity often leads to maximum stress. In the end we survive, but only by the skin of our teeth.
Infinite in All Directions
There are men who serve us, like the consul at Trollesund. And there are men we take for lovers or husbands. You are so young, Lyra, too young to understand this, but I shall tell you anyway and you'll understand it later: men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain. We bear their children, who are witches if they are female, human if not; and then in the blink of an eye they are gone, felled, slain, lost. Our sons, too. When a little boy is growing, he thinks he is immortal. His mother knows he isn't. Each time becomes more painful, until finally your heart is broken. Perhaps that is when Yambe-Akka comes for you. She is older than the tundra. Perhaps, for her, witches' lives are as brief as men's are to us.
The Golden Compass
If there's another world, he lives in bliss; / If there is none, he made the best of this.
"Epitaph on William Muir"
When I was born, I cried myself; / when I die, others will cry. / When I cried, others were happy; / when others cry, I too should feel joy. / "Alas, it passes away so fast!" / The windblown wheel, rolling like a carriage. / They change the torch, but not the fire: / the later flame is still the older flame. / How laughable, the people of this world, / frantically making offerings to Buddha and immortals! / Spiritual alchemy just exhausts the body, / and bowing in worship hurts your head. / In the end, all return to the vastness, / like wind whose form can never be grasped. / Indeed, when called / that is when I'll go; / with a smile, I follow with the crowd.
"Happy About Being Old", translated by Jonathan Chaves in The Columbia Book of Later Chinese Poetry
It was a wasted life, but God forbid that one should be hard upon it, or upon anything in this world that is not deliberately and coldly wrong . . .
In a letter to his friend John Forster.
Rest in peace. The mistake shall not be repeated.
Ahead, there were such sights unfolding: friends and places they'd feared gone forever coming to greet them, eager for shared rapture. There was time for all their miracles now. For ghosts and transformations; for passion and ambiguity; for noon-day visions and midnight glory. Time in abundance. For nothing ever begins. And this story, having no beginning, will have no end.
Weaveworld
My old cat is dead / Who would butt me with his head. / He had the sleekest fur, / He had the blackest purr, / Always gentle with us / Was this black puss, / But when I found him today / Stiff and cold where he lay, / His look was a lion's, / Full of rage, defiance: / O! he would not pretend / That what came was a friend / But met it in pure hate. / Well died, my old cat.
"My Old Cat"
I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.
I regret that I will never know the results of my own autopsy.
In an interview in ;login:, Feb. 1998
May you go safe, my friend, across that dizzy way / No wider than a hair, by which your people go / From earth to Paradise; may you go safe today / With stars and space above, and time and stars below.
"Can you tell me the time of the last complete show?"
"You have the wrong number."
"Eh? Isn't this the Odeon?"
I decide to give a Burtonian answer.
"No, this is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Good-night."
The Cunning Man