E M Forster in ‘Howards Way’ makes this intriguing comment about the death of one of the characters, Ruth Wilcox.‘Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart—almost, but not entirely.”
“It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die—neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.”
Source (via Barrie Hibbert)
E M Forster, Howards End, Chapter 12.
Geoff Pound
Image: “But as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.” The Seafarer's Memorial, Nelson, New Zealand