Sublime

He was emaciated, pale shrunken skin pulled tight over weary twisted bones, holding a cloth of some kind over himself in some final instinct of modesty and self-respect.

He begins with a rather anodyne proverbial saying, that a good name (shem) is better than precious oil (shemen), but then he goes on to say that departing life is better than entering it, for life itself, whatever one’s reputation, is a miserable affair from one end to the other.

bereft.

crushed.

It seemed such an inadequate device, the heart—so finicky, so easily stopped, so Japanese when it should be so German. One moment it’s pumping, the next it’s not. And they lived. The end.