Then he walks away at once in silence, leaning on the arm of
Theseus, and when at last the watchers dare to look, they see
Theseus afar off, alone, screening his eyes with his hand, as if
some sight too dreadful for mortal eyes had passed before him; but
OEdipus is gone, and not with lamentation, but in hope and wonder.
Even when Hamlet dies, and the peal of ordnance is shot off, it is
to congratulate him upon his escape from unbearable woe; and that
is the same in life. If our eye falls on the sad stories of men and
women who have died by their own hand, how seldom do they speak in
the scrawled messages they leave behind them as though they were
going to silence and nothingness! It is just the other way. The
unhappy fathers and mothers who, maddened by disaster, kill their
children are hoping to escape with those they love best out of
miseries they cannot bear; they mean to fly together, as Lot fled
with his daughters from the city of the plain. The man who slays
himself is not the man who hates life; he only hates the sorrow and
the shame which make unbearable that life which he loves only too
well. He is trying to migrate to other conditions; he desires to
live, but he cannot live so. It is the imagination of man that
makes him seek death; only the animal endures, but man hurries away
in the hope of finding something better.

It is, however, strange to reflect how weak man's imagination is
when it comes to deal with what is beyond him, how little able he
is to devise anything that he desires to do when he has escaped
from life. The unsubstantial heaven of a Buddhist, with its
unthinkable Nirvana, is merely the depriving life of all its
attributes; the dull sensuality of the Mohammedan paradise, with
its ugly multiplication of gross delights; the tedious outcries of