Their dying is long and hard to finish: hard to surrender what you never received.
Their exit has no grace or mystery.It’s a little death, hanging dry and measlylike a fruit inside them that never ripened.Dying is strange and hardif it is not our death, but a deaththat takes us by storm, when we’ve ripened nonewithin us.– Rilke
The real question posed by the “Torchwood” scenario is: what would happen to all our death-defying systems if there were no more death? The logical answer is that they would be superfluous. We would have no need for progress or art, faith or fame. Suddenly, we would have nothing to do, yet in the greatest of ironies, we would have endless eons in which to do it. Action would lose its purpose and time its value. This is the true awfulness of immortality.Let us be grateful that the elixir continues to elude us — and toast instead our finitude.