In the mirror he sees a gnarled, tree-bark face on the skull of a wizened monkey. The rheumy eyes are sad with remembrances; the shadows of past joys, the cauldrons of his nurture, the tempering forges of his nature. He isn’t happy about it. He isn’t unhappy about it. Entropy is stamped across the face of the earth, he thinks. I see it everywhere. This is my place there.

Perhaps the best way to rage against the dying of the light is to put a bullet in your head, he muses. End with a bang, not a whimper. It is a difficult thing to do.

He knows – so far he has not been able to do it. It is an act suspended in the netherworld of paths, floating in that void between devout desire and consummated achievement, constrained by the meat-embedded dictate as old as life itself.

It is a cruel and stolid taskmaster, unmoved by higher thoughts. It is heedless of the indignity it enforces at its end, insensate to the ruin it brings to all the realized and fulfilling beauties of life which have come before. It does not ease pain, does not soothe misery, knows no compassion, and recognizes no event horizon for its own end. It is a mindless engine driven by one unbending dictum; it must survive.

It always dies. It is a fool in the machinery of life.

He regarded the face in the mirror a moment longer. Then he turned out the light and went to bed, and dreamed of dead people and places and things.