Sterling Terrell

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You are here: Home / Potpourri / Pact With The Devil

Pact With The Devil

Pact With The Devil

The pact with the devil, is death.

And we all have to cross it.

Naturally, I had to lookup the second law of thermodynamics.

It says that all matter naturally moves towards disorder.

Sometimes it feels like we are all moving toward this entropy at an increasing rate.

But is death the worst thing? Perhaps not.

Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky learned about all of this and it changed his life.

The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which every thing, even every hydrogen atom, is bound. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die; you cannot have mountains and creeks without space, and space is a beauty married to a blind man. The blind man is Freedom, or Time, and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death. The world came into being with the signing of the contract. A scientist calls it the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A poet says, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ Drives my green age.”

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

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Filed Under: PotpourriTagged With: #Death, #Time

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