Commonplace Book

'Death. He had never seen it. As he saw it now, he thought that he had never beheld anything so incontestably real as its irrevocable stillness. Here was finality; here was defeat beyond repair. In the face of this judgment no revolt was possible. Only acceptance was possible. The last word in life's argument had been spoken by an adversary for long remote, forgotten; an adversary who had remained ironically dumb before the babble, knowing that in his own time, with one word, he could produce the irrefutable answer. There was something positively satisfying in the faultlessness of the conclusion. He had not thought that death would be like this. Not cruel, not ugly, not beautiful, not terrifying - merely unanswerable...'

from Challenge by V. Sackville-West (Part II, Chapter V)