Existential
When we designed the world we found it necessary
to leave room for the absences.
You will notice there is a good deal more emptiness
than objects. This ensures that when an item
passes out of existence it may be accommodated.
It would be more correct to say that the world is composed
both of the things that are and the things that are not.
The same holds true for people. When a person passes
they become a void precisely equivalent to themselves.
In a regrettable misapprehension, there are those who believe
they can in some way perceive the lost ones.
They give names to such things: ghosts, spirits, visitations.
I assure you they cannot; they that are gone
are gone for good and all, and are manifestly absent
in every way. So much will surely now be obvious:
otherwise they would be unable to occupy
that particular non-existence corresponding to the former them.
Since the beginning these spaces have continued
to grow in number with no sign of abatement.
It is our conclusion, therefore, that in the end
the whole of existence will be a single miraculous absence.
John Stammers, Interior Night (London: Picador, 2010), 17.
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