/lit/ - Literature

>>23467332
>One self-proclaimed prophet came through Ten-Towns denying the possibility of an afterlife, claiming that those people who had died and were raised by priests, had, in fact, never died, and that their claims of experiences beyond the grave were an elaborate trick played on them by their own hearts, a ruse to ease the path to nothingness. For that is all there was, he said, an emptiness, a nothingness.
>Never in my life have I ever heard one begging so desperately for someone to prove him wrong.
>This is kind of what I believe right now… although, I do not want to be proved wrong…
>For what are we left with if there remains no mystery? What hope might we find if we know all of the answers?
>What is it within us, then, that so desperately wants to deny magic and to unravel mystery? Fear, I presume, based on the many uncertainties of life and the greatest uncertainty of death. Put those fears aside, I say, and live free of them, for if we just step back and watch the truth of the world, we will find that there is indeed magic all about us, unexplainable by numbers and formulas. What is the passion evoked by the stirring speech of the commander before the desperate battle, if not magic? What is the peace that an infant might know in its mother’s arms, if not magic? What is love, if not magic?
>No, I would not want to live in a world without dragons, as I would not want to live in a world without magic, for that is a world without mystery, and that is a world without faith.
>And that, I fear, for any reasoning, conscious being, would be the cruelest trick of all.

>Drizzt Do’Urden (Streams of Silver)