Do you believe, do you suppose, is it a thought that you have or have had, that where you are headed is a place? A place like the places you know?

Do you believe, do you think, have you surmised or heard or been told, that you will encounter things in that place? Things as you have encountered before? Things at all? What do you know of things, who only things know?

Do you believe, is it something you imagine or has been imagined for you, that where you are going is filled with people? People like you? Perhaps you are under the impression that you will not only find people, but you will be so blessed as to be greeted, like some great general would be, returning from years at war, by people who loved you when they were alive? By those people who you believe love you, even now? Do you believe, my friend, that you are a person?

(Truth be told: It is likely that you are, though it is impossible to make sense of those words, so you might as well not believe such. All one can do is give some sort of assent: be it a conspicuously enthusiastic, even frantic, “Yes! I am a person!” or a mere perfunctory nod of acknowledgment.)

And so, being a person, you understand: Just as you began, you must end.

But that end, that ending, do you believe that it will be like any other end which you have known? Every end that you have seen was followed by something. Anything. Every end which you have witnessed was the end of something which was not you. Every end was that of something which was not the entirety of your faculties. In particular, your faculties to comprehend the present and recall the past, to bring forth memory.

Do you believe, my friend, that there are memories to be recalled in death?

Do you believe that those who have died before you—a hundred billion and counting—remember you? Do you believe that they exist as you do, such as you do, such as we might even speak of “them” as we speak of anyone alive? Do you believe that they dwell in some place, some elsewhere, some domain in which they await your arrival? Is there time in this place? How is it that they might await you were there not? Do you believe that they are watching you, as you watch people, as you watch yourself? They cannot be watching with eyes like you have. Those eyes are gone forever. So what is it that they employ in their watching of you? Do you believe that these waiters and watchers—in their unnameable, inscrutible, elsewhere and elsewhen—are surrounded by things? The things you know are only those which you sense, things which you experience, things of which you can conceive. On what notion do you base your belief that, should there be things in the dwelling of the dead, that these will be any things which you might recognize as such?

No.

No, my friend. Where you are headed is not a place. There are no people there. There are no things. And what is more: You are already there, insofar as one can meaningfully speak of this “there” whither you go. Thither you will head because thither you are heading and thither have you always headed, hurtling headlong into the elsewhere, to be frozen in an infinite, black light, throughout the entirety of the single elsewhen moment.

Why must you go, you ask? I am afraid that you would not like the answer, even if I were given leave to give it. So this must suffice, not that it will matter for much longer: The sole reason for your birth, the only purpose your life has, is that you make the journey—and that you do it as quietly as you can.