[b]Tom Stoppard
Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.[/b]
Doesn’t surprise me.
Give us this day our daily mask.
Remember when it was only one?
For all the compasses in the world, there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure.
Actually, it is twice as mysterious as it sounds.
Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one’s memory. And yet, I can’t remember it.
On the other hand, I am inundated with such moments now.
We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.
Glum enough for you?
Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn’t death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees but it doesn’t bring death home to anyone- -it doesn’t catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says, ‘One day you are going to die.’
Gee, you think so?