/lit/ - Literature

Death is here already. It is all around you. The whole world is a graveyard, stuffed with corpses. Nature is a painted catacomb. The clearest pond is swirling with rot and the soil is corpses. Dead, dried, compounded corpses. Families, generations, billions of years of creatures that became corpses, then became creatures, then became corpses. Breathe in the air. That same air has been in the lungs of thousands of men before you. Men who are dead. You thought you were the first? It was in the lungs and blood of lepers, starving children, men who stood on the gallows, waiting their turns. They found and used and lost it long before you gulped it down. Can you catch the scent? Do you have the nose? The very air reeks of death.

What does /lit/ think about death?

I know a great many of you will be tempted to try to brush this off with cynical or aversive comments that completely deny the reality of every single person's impending doom, so please-- refrain from attempting to derail the discussion. Death is so fucking scary that it's hard to imagine without your chest tightening up. So, philosophically, how does it fit into the grand scheme of thing?