There is no example of complete death or annihilation in the world. Just graceful and profound, abrupt change. Nothing goes out of existence...why should we be so different? Why not a universe of cooperative thought and feeling in a speck of sand? We know so little of death...and why not life beyond, yet assume volumes full?
|
I can forgive one’s ignore, but I will never tolerate his annihilation of conscience.
|
Love...or absence of love, is all powerful. Atomic weapons can annihilate the body...but only love can make or break a spirit.
|
Who, if I objected, would hear me among the angelic orders?
For if the least One pressed me intimately against its breast,
I would be lost in its infinite Immensity!
Because beauty, which we mortals can barely endure, is the beginning of terror;
we stand awed when it benignly declines to annihilate us.
Every Angel is terrifying!
('Rilke’s First Elegy' by Rainer Maria Rilke, loose translation by Michael R. Burch)
|