Some old people are oppressed by the fear of death. In the young there is a justification for this
felling. Young men who have reason to fear that they will be killed in battle may justifiably feel
bitter in the thought that they have been cheated of the best things that life has to offer. But in
an old man who has known human joys and sorrows, and has achived whatever work it was in him to do,
the fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble. The best way to overcome it - so at least it seems
to me - is to make your interest gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls
of ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human
existance should be like a riverl - small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing