Pathetic Either Or and Cryogenics

“Tomorrow I shall live (the fool will say);

Today’s itself too late:  the wise lived yesterday.”

~ Martial

[T]he world is a monster. Any three-year-old can see how unsatisfactory and clumsy is this whole business of reproducing and dying by the billions. We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet. There is not a people in the world who behaves as badly as praying mantises. But wait, you say, there is no right and wrong in nature; right and wrong is a human concept. Precisely: we are moral creatures, then, in an amoral world. The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die—does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our skins.

~ Annie Dillard, Pilgrim and Tinker Creek, “Fecundity”, p. 179

The nonsense that the will can overpower

The flood of facts is humans’ favorite fantasy.

Eternity is not an eaten hour.

Since Eve subscribed to Satan’s fallacy,

The will has fought against the hard-barked truth.

We think that we can overcome with acts.

Our cleverness will resurrect our youth

Despite blood’s bleeding sense.  The scientific facts

Will be deployed to fend off common sense:

The scientific breakthroughs that we cause

Will shatter death though walls now thick and dense,

Will crumble by diverting nature’s laws.

  The orb of death will come to standstill or

    Some God will intervene and end the gore.

~ Phillip Whidden