(no subject)

She knew, with an odd certainty, that she was going to die, and the tranquility of this knowledge soothed her. Death awaited her like a safe refuge that the creature could not enter, and a flood of memories from her past began to flash before her as if she were drowning. When she was ten, still a little girl, she'd had nightmares of standing on a high precipice. She would stand there and consider, too rationally, the cost of living versus the cost of dying. She must have been a philosophically minded girl, rather high-minded for a ten year old. She knew this to be true, even through the fog of confusion that overwhelmed her at the moment. On that precipice, she had decided to jump because, after all, there was no God, and if she were dead, she would simply cease to be conscious, and she would feel no pain and know no regret- know, in fact, absolutely nothing, as if she had never existed. But just before she stretched her arms out like wings of flesh, she had looked out into the distance- it was the east, and the faint rosy colors of the dawn were touching the horizon. And it was so breathtakingly beautiful, like nothing that have come from the mind or the hand of man, and she had suddenly felt the kindness of some creative force. Suddenly she had remembered the beauty of the total eclipse of the sun she had seen in Nova Scotia, the calm quiet of the craters of the moon, the myriad colors of the stars that come out at night. She had decided to live then, if only to experience such beauty in order to divine whether some extrahuman power must have created it all. And she had awakened in a cold sweat in her bed, shaking with the lingering terror- not of having nearly leaped to her death, but of having compromised her faith in the absence of God.

~Barbour and Raleigh