dying to live

“… why I speak of the horror of sheer limitless successive existence.  The desire simply to perdure forever, the resentful refusal to die–which at a deeper level is also the refusal to die into the now.  But that sort of dying, that relinquishing of the past–that’s precisely what life is.  It’s also a matter of relinquishing the self that clings to the future so long as that future is understood only as the ego’s mere duration.  That’s a craving that makes one small, cowardly, greedy for existence even at the expense of others.  True life is a dying into the now, and ultimately the fullness of life is a dying into the eternal now. And learning to live is learning the art of dying fruitfully.  Unless the grain fall to earth and perish, and all that.  To learn to die properly is to learn to live.”

David Bentley Hart, Roland in Moonlight