The vast and terrible depth."“Of course,” he said.“The inexhaustibility.”“I understand.”“The whole huge nameless thing.”“Yes, absolutely.”“The massive darkness.”“Certainly, certainly.”“The whole terrible endless hugeness.”“I know exactly what you mean.

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.

Would you ask a man who bags groceries if he fears death not because it is death but because there are still some interesting groceries he would like to bag?

This is death. I don't want it to tarry awhile so I can write a monograph. I want it to go away for seventy or eighty years.

It is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself. A network of symbols has been introduced, an entire awesome technology wrested from the gods. It makes you feel like a stranger in your own dying.

You feel sorry for yourself. You think you're missing something and you don't know what it is. You're lonely inside your life. You have a job and a family and a fully executed will, already, at your age, because the whole point is to die prepared, die legal, with all the papers signed. Die liquid, so they can convert to cash.

The dead have a presence.

Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.