When, However, It Came To Requiring Me To Have Faith In What Seemed Good To Him And His Friends, Rather Than To Me And Mine, We Did Not Agree So Well.

He then began to shake death at me; I met him with a reflection that I have never seen in print, though it is so obvious that it must have occurred to each one of my readers.

I said that every man is an immortal to himself: he only dies as far as others are concerned; to himself he cannot, by any conceivable possibility, do so. For how can he know that he is dead until he IS dead? And when he IS dead, how can he know that he is dead? If he does, it is an abuse of terms to say that he is dead. A man can know no more about the end of his life than he did about the beginning. The most horrible and loathed death still resolves itself into being badly frightened, and not a little hurt towards the end of one's life, but it can never come to being unbearably hurt for long together. Besides, we are at all times, even during life, dead and dying to by far the greater part of our past selves. What we call dying is only dying to the balance, or residuum. This made the priest angry. He folded his arms and said, "Basta, basta," nor did he speak to me again. It is because I noticed the effect it produced upon my fellow-passenger that I introduce it here.

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