Page 40 - All India Magazine Dec-2024

The Living and the Dead

The attitude of the living towards the dead is one of the most
loathsome expressions of mankind’s selfish ignorance.
It’s either a complete I-couldn’t-care-less attitude, or else,
“Ohh, anything to get rid of that!” I have some children here
(they’re no longer children), who live here with their fathers and
mothers (who aren’t very old), and some of those children told
me “dreams” in which they saw their fathers or mothers dead
and coming to them... and they sent them back violently, saying,
“You’re dead, you’ve got no right to come and bother us”!...
You’re dead, you’ve got no right to come and bother us. There
you are. That’s... few will be frank enough to say so, but it’s very
widespread.
Many things must change before a little bit of truth can mani-
fest — that’s all I can say.
*
That’s what I said to T. (I don’t think she understood), I told her
that there isn’t so much difference between what men call “life”
and what they call “death”; the difference is very small, and grows
still smaller when you go into the problem in depth and in all the de-
tails. One always make a clean cut between the two — it’s quite stu-
pid: some living are already half dead, and many dead are very alive.
*
Human beings have made an appalling tragedy out of death. And
I saw, with all these recent experiences, I saw how many, many
poor human beings have been destroyed by the very people they
loved the most! Under the pretext that they were dead.
People give them a very bad time.
Destroyed?

Yes, burned. Or shut up in a box without air and light — while fully
conscious. And just because they can no longer express them-

40 All India Magazine, December 2024