The Summit

"Socrates was wrong. Death does not create the perfect home for a philosopher. Maybe only Keirkegard who had cronic neurosis for living enjoys eternal conciousness. But for the rest of us, who suffered in life, living was hell and so is dying," he said as his mustashe twitched, wether with irrtation or discomfort I do not know. I sat up, unafraid of the apparition at the end of my bed. He had woken me, with this proclimation, from an uneasy sleep and I welcomed the intrusion

"I gleaned that much for myself," I replied, "If living is remembering and dying is forgetting then the use of remembering is entirely negated." This was of course something which had bothered me for the past 25 years of my life and the chance to confirm this horrific suspicion was too much to pass regardless of the hour. It derived itself from the mathmatical understanding of negation. If a is canceled by b and b is the inevitable value of a then it does not matter what a's vaule is.

He continued to shimmer without a smile or any hint of emotion. His eyes were dark and witholding like stones of unyelding strength.

"When I was young I was happy. Maybe someday that evolutionary taunt will be removed because as soon as we are content with life, we are thrown into it. This short happiness at the beggining of our life sparks the only hope we have throughout the misery; the hope that we may one day expierence that again," he said this all in one breath as if he held it in.

I smiled at him, at his sad features. It was like looking at the moon, wise and old yet so worn with the craters of knowledge.

"Why have you come?" I ask, which logically should ave been my first question. In response he waves his arms as if deflecting my inquiry and continues with his tangent.

"I wish death had been less releuctant in taking me, instead I am left as this imperial magestrate much like Apollo, beconning to the dead," he said.

His word choice was much like his writing, dense and littered with vocabulary like a thick fog over a city. One part of what he said registered to my adapting ears, beconning to the dead.

"Doesn't your view of death go against Amor Fati?" I ask before I forget.

"To love fate is one thing. To endure it is another. I am comfortable with my fate, knowing that it cannot be changed but I am upset that it is happening now," he said with a glimmer of a smile curling across his sober visage.

All the pictures I can recall of him are sober as if he were staring into a void and it were staring into him. I smile at my own joke and look up at him, but he is gone all I hear are a few whispers which travel through space and time to my ears. I hope you have prepared my friend because your time is coming.

I smile at the place he had sat, not quite sure of what I learned from the expierence. And suddenly I remmeber what Apollo did. He had guided dead souls to the underworld.

I look down at myself as the silver moonlight splashes over me and cant resist laughing. My body lies below me as I shimer above it. The reason I am laughing is not that I am dead but the fact that my death has been so melodramatic.