The Fear of Life

Author's Note: As I read through Jekyll and Hyde one last time I came across this quote: “I began to perceive more deeply than it had ever been stated, the trembling immateriality, the mist-like transience, of this seemingly so solid body in which we walk attired.” (105) It really stuck a chord in me – how fragile is life!

At a moment’s notice, life could end. Snuffed out like –that– with no one the wiser. There is no life without death, no morning without night, and yet we fear it. Why?

As men we think we are invincible, and we fear anything we cannot conquer. Death comes, and we watch it take everyone on earth, and we know that someday it will come for us. There’s nothing we can do about it either, with all our medicines and technologies and miracles: everyone dies. It’s a fact of life.

No one knows what death means. No! –don’t say it means we are no longer alive. We all know that: what does that mean? Is there another life we go to? Perhaps we travel to our judgment. Perhaps we all convene in a meetinghouse and torture those who did wrong in life. Or, perhaps, there is nothing. We simply die, game over, adios. The fear of the unknown is man’s strongest of fears, and there is nothing we know less about than death. It’s only natural we fear what we do not know.

We risk death every day, every time we get up in the morning, every time we open our eyes, every time we take a breath. Living, in its essence, means death. Perhaps not today, perhaps not tomorrow, but someday all of us will die. We fear it because it is inevitable, because it follows us everywhere, skulking in the shadows and lurking just behind us with every step we take.

This makes our fear quite ironic, really. Life cannot exist without death: life means death: life is death. And yet we both fear death and idolize life. Ah, such is the petty nature of man, to hate without knowledge and to fear without despair.