on life and death

Excerpts form the book story of San Michele written by a Swedish doctor Axel Munthe.

“I have not been watching during all these ;years the battle between Life and Death without getting to know something of the two contestants, when I first saw Death at work in the hospital wards it was a mere wrestling match between the two. A mere child’s play compared with what I saw later. I saw Him at Naples killing more than a thousand people a day before my very eyes. I saw Him at Messina burying over one house and men, women and children under the falling houses in a single minute. Later I saw him at Verdun, his arms red with blood to the elbows, slaughtering four hundred thousand men and moving down the flower of a whole army on the plains of Flanders and Somme. It only since I have seen him operating on a large scale that I have begun to understand the attics of warfare. It is a fascinating study full of mystery and contradictions. It all seems at first a bewildering chaos, a blind meaningless slaughter full of confusion and blunders at one moment life brandishing a new weapon in its hand advances victoriously, only to retire the next moment, defeated by triumphant death. It is not so. The battle is regulated in its minutes details by an immutable law of equilibrium between Life and Death where ever the equilibrium is upset by some accidental cause be it pestilence earth quake or war, vigilant nature sets to work at once  to readjust the balance to call forth new beings to take the place of the fallen compelled by the irresistible force of a natural law men and women fall in each other’s arms blindfolded by lust unaware that it is death who presides over their mating his aphrodisiac in one hand, his narcotic in the other. Death the giver of life, the slayer of life, the beginning and the end”

A lovely allegory and mystery of life  this concept is very vibrant in Kashmir shaivism.