What is this joie de vivre that they talk about nowadays?  Our hunger for God, our thirst of immortality, of survival, will always stifle in us this pitiful enjoyment of the life that passes and abides not.  It is the frenzied love of life, the love that would have life to be unending, that most often urges us to long for death.  “If it is true that I am to die utterly,” we say to ourselves, “then once I am annihilated the world has ended so far as I am concerned—­it is finished.  Why, then, should it not end forthwith, so that no new consciousnesses, doomed to suffer the tormenting illusion of a transient and apparential existence, may come into being?  If, the illusion of living being shattered, living for the mere sake of living or for the sake of others who are likewise doomed to die, does not satisfy the soul, what is the good of living?  Our best remedy is death.”  And thus it is that we chant the praises of the never-ending rest because of our dread of it, and speak of liberating death.

Leopardi, the poet of sorrow, of annihilation, having lost the ultimate illusion, that of believing in his immortality—­

        Peri l’inganno estremo
    ch’eterno io mi credei,

spoke to his heart of l’infinita vanita del tutto, and perceived how close is the kinship between love and death, and how “when love is born deep down in the heart, simultaneously a languid and weary desire to die is felt in the breast.”  The greater part of those who seek death at their own hand are moved thereto by love; it is the supreme longing for life, for more life, the longing to prolong and perpetuate life, that urges them to death, once they are persuaded of the vanity of this longing.

The problem is tragic and eternal, and the more we seek to escape from it, the more it thrusts itself upon us.  Four-and-twenty centuries ago, in his dialogue on the immortality of the soul, the serene Plato—­but was he serene?—­spoke of the uncertainty of our dream of being immortal and of the risk that the dream might be vain, and from his own soul there escaped this profound cry—­Glorious is the risk!—­kalos gar o kindunos, glorious is the risk that we are able to run of our souls never dying—­a sentence that was the germ of Pascal’s famous argument of the wager.

Faced with this risk, I am presented with arguments designed to eliminate it, arguments demonstrating the absurdity of the belief in the immortality of the soul; but these arguments fail to make any impression upon me, for they are reasons and nothing more than reasons, and it is not with reasons that the heart is appeased.  I do not want to die—­no; I neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live for ever and ever and ever.  I want this “I” to live—­this poor “I” that I am and that I feel myself to be here and now, and therefore the problem of the duration of my soul, of my own soul, tortures me.