Life is precious and it is worth loving, when you fall in love with your life, life payback with love and harmony. Life is a long journey and it shall experience every bit of it.
Another contemporary consensus might be: You wear the best shoes you can afford, you try to know the best restaurants in Rome and their staff, you drive the best car, and your vacation in Tenerife. And what a cook you are! Or you hunt down the next tribe's pigs in exciting raids; you grill sweet potatoes; you trade for TV sets and hunt white-feathered birds. Everyone you know agrees: this is real life. Maybe you burn prisoners. You set a drunk on fire.
You fight as a human or as an elite to achieve... whatever your own culture tells you to do: to publish the paper that proves it; to move up in the company and get a high title and salary, stock options and perks; to get a loan to store beans until their price goes up; to evade capture, feed your children or raise them to a feather edge; or to count a coup or perfect your calligraphy; to eat the king's deer or catch the poacher; to spear the seal, intimidate the enemy and be a great man or a beloved woman and die respected for the pigs or the title or the shoes. No funeral. Forget the funeral. A big birthday party. Since everyone around you agree.
Since everyone around you agrees, since there are people on earth, that land is worth, or work is worth, or learning is worth, ortitles, necklaces, degrees, murex shells, or owning slaves. Everyone knows that bees sting and ghosts haunt and that giving away robes humiliates rivals. That enemies are barbarians. That the wise swim through the rock of the earth; that houses create dirt, runways attract planes, tornadoes punish, ancestors watch, and you can buy a shorter stay in purgatory. The black rock is sacred, or the scroll; or the pangolin is sacred, the quetzal is sacred, this tree, the water, the rock, the stone, the cow, the cross or the mountain, and all are true. Red Sox. Or nothing is sacred, as any intelligent person knows. So the illusion, like the visual field, is complete. It has no holes, except for books that you read and soon forget. And death takes us by storm. What was it, this life? What else did it offer? If for him it was the bridge, if for her it was copyright, if for everyone it was and is an optimal mix of family and friends, learning, contributions, and the joy of creating and improving, what else is there, or was there, or will there ever be? What else is a vision or fact of time and the peoples it bears, springing from the mouth of the cosmos, from the round mouth of eternity, in a vast and multicolored utterance.
In the complex fabric of this utterance, which is like a cloth, the centuries, continents and classes dwell in its infinite interstices. Each people knows only its own squares in this fabric, its wars and instruments and arts, and also the starry sky.Life is life and does not mess it up with decisions about.