Often, truth can be found in a work of fiction.
For instance, there's this train of thought
from James Lee Burke in his novel, "Swan Peak."
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"At a certain time in your life, you think about death in a serious
way, and you think about it often. You see your eyes and mouth
impacted by dirt, your clothes a moldy recepticle for water leaking
through the topsoil. You see a frozen mound backlit by a wintry sky,
a plain of brown grass with tumbleweeds bouncing across it. . .

. . . When you see these images in your sleep or experience them in
your waking day, you know they do not represent a negotiable fate.
The images are indeed your future, and no exception will be made
for you.

During these moments, when you try to push away these images
from the edge of your vision, you have one urge only, and that is to
somehow leave behind a gesture, a cipher carved on a rock, a good
deed, some visible scratch on history that will tell others you were here
and that you tried to make the world a better place.

The great joke is that any wisdom most of us acquire can seldom
be passed on to others. I suspect that this reality is at the heart of
most old people's anger."
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I think these couple of paragraphs describe, exactly, our collective need
to be here, on this site.

What think you??

-Fini