In some purple and grey evening of the closing year, one of those pale hours which seem to dissolve away our flesh that our spirit may grow more reinforced in itself, we can sit and dream of those who were dear to us, whom life has left so that they are no more found. With far-away eyes and hearts heavy with memories we remember our dead, how brilliant their faces, how dear their voices, how moving their presences once were to us: and from memories so harrowing we have not wracking despair and agony, but only pitying tears, which seem inadequate as issue of the certainty that we will never see again those looks nor hear those voices nor feel those presences. These dead were all in all to us, and yet they have gone without trace left either for us or for the world. And why does our reason not swoon in a nerve-shattering flood of horror when it sees the deaths of people whom we loved, or whom we have merely seen doing and moving, people who have pleased us or hurt us, whose warm hands (full and trembling with life) have touched ours, whose glances have met our own; why are we not terrified as we stand by at their supreme moment when life and death meet, and a world in the winking of an eye is reduced to nothing? And when we have lost our familiar friends, how can we go on living, and talking? how can we take pleasure in things or be sorry, in our usual fashion? And how think of them after they have gone, with such calm regret and resignation, whereas it was a frenzied grief, touching madness, which the anticipation of their future deaths evoked in us? The answer to these questions is that the knowledge how we must ourselves some day die is always stirring in us, forms part of our flesh and blood, moves in our nerves, and finds our own inevitable destined end prefigured in each death of those about us. We say, or rather we feel obscurely, that what is happening to them will some day happen to us, when the fatal time comes for us to pay this dread tribute which they are paying. Perhaps it is the same current of ideas, which makes collective disaster, such as war or pestilence, less frightful to us than the tragedies of individuals. The consciousness that we are ourselves exposed to such perils reduces our commiseration, not out of egotism (as is commonly thought), but from a sense that we too will bear our part in the eventual expiation. The idea that in our turn we will suffer this softens in some odd way our dread of the inevitable and the distress we might feel at another's pitiable situation.