When you're born you begin to die becoming Yeats' "tattered cloak, "sans everything" as Jaques says in As You Like It. Then there's the exchange between Nagg and Nell in Beckett's Fin de partie. "Do you believe in the life to come?" "Mine was always that." But what about the fly swatter or "Roach Brothel, " SNL's satire of Roach Motel. The fact is there's no God to punish or protect. A soothing and terrifying notion propounded by Lucretius in his 1700 line poem De rerum natura, On the Nature of Things. You might say that Democritus who introduced the atom to the Greeks was the country cousin or ancestor of the Roman, Lucretius. Time may be eternal but life is horrifyingly finite with the famous sign over Dante's Inferno warning "Lasciate ogni speranza all ch'entre." No mention of another Italianate expression, "the dog that barks doesn't bite."
read "The Sale of My Parents' Apartment," Metropolitan Diary, The New York Times
read "Ultimate Rejection" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star
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