ONE LESSON, EACH OF US TO LEARN

we are given life ... immortal life from an immortal source ... what are we then to make of death ... is it just another step the progress of life must follow ... an open door across the room from a closed window ... or is it something essentially as it is intimately connected to pain spilled urine shit and blood grief and justified despair ... all conspiring to make a point not least of which seems the loss of our pretended dignity ... all our honors and high esteem to end in a mouth and eyes we have no longer the power to close ... perhaps this once at the end truly suitably dumbfounded and open-eyed with astonishment ... as if we had again as so often before confounded the means with the end ... we think education was meant for living when life is given in order to learn ... a life-long lesson for each of us no matter how long or how short ... to learn ... but to learn what ... death as an inescapable lesson but to what moral to what end ... isn't this last lesson just that ... the teaching of an end ... the one way the only way we creatures in time can live under the eternal ... finite creatures under the infinite ... by seeing things defined by their end