Death is a gift for our life

Mark Twain always can impress me and make me lost in thought. As I think, he can simply presented me something and even let me guessing the ending easily, but he can draw my focus and think about what he has said after I got into his trap.

 Firstly, five gift, Pleasure, Love, Fame, Riches and Death, were given to me to choose and I was advised to choose “wisely”. The word “wisely” draw my attention, and seeing the five gifts again, the best choice that the author think about must be the “Death” in my logic, specifically the reverse-logic. Then a simple question crowded into my mind: why is the Death?

 After showing a lot of descriptions of the man who had chosen the Pleasure, Love, Fame and Riches one after another and was confronted with a lot of miserable life experience, the book ended with a tragedy. After suffering form what the four fake gifts bring, the man wanted to get a peaceful “rest”, but Death was “wanting” because it was already given to “a little child” and he was left “the wanton insult of Old Age”.

 What Mark Twain wanted to illustrate was a profound truth that a lot of happiness we chased after such as Pleasure, Love, Fame and Riches was temporary and short-lived and even bring us too much Pain, Grief, Shame and Poverty so Death would be a release and a good choice for us. That sounds very wired and in a way it makes sense. And reading that, I can feel that the author show his negative attitude to the human nature and he criticized the dark side of the human nature and felt disappointed about it. So he dared to let “a little child” to get the “Death” as a gift.

 From my perspective, probably the life can survive the author’s circle of negativity, and Death can be some kind of gift, a positive gift indeed. There is no doubt that Death is a terminal point of our life so that it can remind us of our short life and promote us to pursue our value of life. It’s the fact that nobody can be eternal and live in this world forever. And because we don’t have innumerable time to chase our meaning of life, we know we must do something right now and raise our courage to try it. What’s more, it’s Death that makes us know what the true value of our life will be. Pleasure, Love, Fame and Riches are not meaningless but we will think it’s meaningless when we uncover their “temporary disguises” as the author described. They are not eternal and they will always leave us forever before or after we die. Accordingly when we put them as our life goals and we crazily chase after them, they can easily ruin us, making us corrupt, lost and become a wicked man. If we can persist in our morality and don’t become the bad guys, we probably can’t accept the huge gap between the fact and the illusion. We will feel greatly frustrated by thinking that in the end we pursue for nothing real and we are just cheated by the other sides of them, namely Pain, Grief, Shame and Poverty. Ultimately, as I think Death is a gift but isn’t an achievement. Here is something I don’t agree with the author’s way of thinking. We should respect our life rather than await our death. We can try our utmost to do something meaningful such as volunteering to help someone in need, appealing to people to protect our environment and so on. We can make a little bit differences in the world around us by advocating sticking to our morality and kindness, which will also help ourselves live a more meaningful life by enriching our life and filling our life with a great deal of positive energy. And we can try to discover ourselves, dig out our own interest and create a world belonging to ourselves. Chasing after our real dream will encourage us and give us power to build up a our own world. When we are dying we will have a clear and peaceful mind by realizing that we may discover our own  value and live a meaningful life.

 To the people who have found their true value of life, Death is not frightening and it can also become a good gift for their life. As British writer Susan Ertz has said, “Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.” Death can be a gift to help us get back to the path where we are looking for our true value of life.

2015-04-18

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