The Dead

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The dead are dead. We cannot contact them. They cannot contact us. That is why death is so momentous: it is an unpassable barrier. One who dies passes into a realm we cannot glimpse however distantly or hear however faintly. There is no need to do things “for the ancestors.” We can only live for ourselves, our contemporaries, and those who will come after us. Somehow, people not yet born are not divided from us. We and futurity are one; the dead are other.

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