The Door at the End of the Corridor

“Life is a corridor, and death, a door,” teaches Master Po. Perhaps young Caine can be forgiven for not being quite so sure. Ego’s voices — the voices of the cultures among which most of us are raised — tell us that there is no door, only a wall of termination.

This is the dull, throbbing, mindless fear upon which all our discourse about death is based. We heard it all summer long, and we felt the shrieking pulse of its undertone, like Basho’s cicadas:

soon they will die –
yet, showing no sign of it,
cicadas screech

Idiots with no awareness of life and therefore no knowledge of death ranted that the government would become a euthanasia machine after the passing of a national health care plan. Yes, it was maddening, but also revealing — it showed us how far we are from understanding the simplest and clearest truths; how fixed is our culture’s obsession with death as the wall of darkness at the end of life’s corridor. It would be comical except for one thing: this abysmal and blind certainty about death proceeds from an equally dismal understanding of life; thus, we fail to value or truly experience either.

By the time Caine grew and became a teacher himself, he had discarded his childhood fears and stilled the voice of ego and its schoolboy chatter about the “corridor of death.” Indeed, what he discovered was that the only thing that must die is that inane obsession with the most superficial appearances — that because you cannot see someone anymore, his life has been forever terminated.

In killing that vapid belief and its feeding fears, Caine realized that death is an ending “as waking is an end to sleep.” He rediscovered what Lao Tzu wrote so long ago:

Life is never exhausted –
It is only delusion that dies.