Is Everness After?

We play with obscure forces, which we cannot lay hold of, by names we give them, as children play with fire, and it seems for a moment as if all the energy had lain unused in things until we came to apply it to our transitory life and its needs. But repeatedly through the millenaries these forces shake off their names and rise like an oppressed class against their little lords, no, not even against — they simply rise, and civilizations fall from the shoulders of the earth, which becomes large and spacious once again and alone with its seas, its stars, and its trees.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, "Worpswede"

There can be no truth since truth varies with the individual and the circumstance. There can be no communication since words interpret what seems to be, not what is. There can be no sanity, for sanity demands stability, which is not to be found in the human condition.
— Luigi Pirandello

.... in a Universe that is suddenly deprived of illusion and of light, man feels a stranger. His is an irremediable exile, because he is deprived of memories of a lost homeland as much as he lacks the hope of a promised land to come. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity.
— Albert Camus

Yes, I wrote about Wilkins. But he also invented a wonderful word that strangely enough has never been used by English poets — an awful word, really, a terrible word. Everness, of course, is better than eternity.... But he also created a beautiful word, a word that's a poem in itself, full of hopelessness, sadness, and dispair: the word neverness.
— From the Borges interview in Writers at Work, Fourth Series, p.140.

Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the Dawn has come.
— Rabindranath Tagore

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream: it may be so at the moment of death.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne

When the news of Charles Darwin's "terrible theories" reached the Bishop of Worcester's wife, she is said to have exclaimed, "Descended from monkeys? My dear, let us hope it isn't true! But if it is true, let us hope that it doesn't become widely known!"
— Source unknown