Sweet Death

The summer drought cut dry, choking out vegetation as green withered to pale brown. Death throes clarify transcendence and stimulate pragmatic finality.

Civilizations are defined by how their best works demonstrate peak human potential, and their finest efforts often appear just as death is overtaking the whole. A generation follows, continuing as if the last breath didn't yet happen, and often produces as it must, like an aftershock, but then art and philosophy rest idle without any force able to spur them, and then the civilization's death is undeniable.

We recall Western Civilization still alive in the 19th century, when in a short span lived Goethe, Beethoven, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche before utter silence fell. Spengler popularized the collapse and Nietzsche knew he was already living in an exhausted period. Today we avoid the implication of our impotence and ended civilization by praising imaginary progress as we dig ourselves deeper into misery, failure, and disharmony, and still no great art or philosophy has appeared for a century, and a previous spirit of vitality is clearly lacking, a barren signal that the end has long arrived.

The apple tree shriveled as it parched under the oppressive sun. It sensed quite correctly this would be its last season and there was no reason to hold back anything. The tree would perish, at least in its current form, so it summoned all the glucose stored within to put into its children, the conditions of death making for the sweetest fruits.

The greatest sweetness preludes death, an anomaly that is not intended to be sustained. "This is over, may a different way come another day."

Tempting fruit is a calculated last effort gambit, not a free gift or lucky coincidence. Life must go on, so reasons the tree. With its final gasp, it manipulates all seducible creatures with the tastiest lure, so they take and feast inadvertently, and inevitably spread seeds throughout the ground to give the largest chance of the tree's genetic expression rising again like a reborn phoenix.

We see that after all the pretense, praise, and phony selflessness, all life works for advantage and propagation, coercing others and commandeering them when beneficial. In bleak times, we should be more aware of deathly schemes.