Trailing Clouds of Glory by George Bernard Shaw

Childhood is a stage in the process of that continual remanufacture of
the Life Stuff by which the human race is perpetuated. The Life Force
either will not or cannot achieve immortality except in very low
organisms: indeed it is by no means ascertained that even the amoeba
is immortal. Human beings visibly wear out, though they last longer
than their friends the dogs. Turtles, parrots, and elephants are
believed to be capable of outliving the memory of the oldest human
inhabitant. But the fact that new ones are born conclusively proves
that they are not immortal. Do away with death and you do away with
the need for birth: in fact if you went on breeding, you would
finally have to kill old people to make room for young ones.

Now death is not necessarily a failure of energy on the part of the
Life Force. People with no imagination try to make things which will
last for ever, and even want to live for ever themselves. But the
intelligently imaginative man knows very well that it is waste of
labor to make a machine that will last ten years, because it will
probably be superseded in half that time by an improved machine
answering the same purpose. He also knows that if some devil were to
convince us that our dream of personal immortality is no dream but a
hard fact, such a shriek of despair would go up from the human race as
no other conceivable horror could provoke. With all our perverse
nonsense as to John Smith living for a thousand million eons and for
ever after, we die voluntarily, knowing that it is time for us to be
scrapped, to be remanufactured, to come back, as Wordsworth divined,
trailing ever brightening clouds of glory. We must all be born again,
and yet again and again. We should like to live a little longer just
as we should like 50 pounds: that is, we should take it if we could
get it for nothing; but that sort of idle liking is not will. It is
amazing--considering the way we talk--how little a man will do to get
50 pounds: all the 50-pound notes I have ever known of have been more
easily earned than a laborious sixpence; but the difficulty of
inducing a man to make any serious effort to obtain 50 pounds is
nothing to the difficulty of inducing him to make a serious effort to
keep alive. The moment he sees death approach, he gets into bed and
sends for a doctor. He knows very well at the back of his conscience
that he is rather a poor job and had better be remanufactured. He
knows that his death will make room for a birth; and he hopes that it
will be a birth of something that he aspired to be and fell short of.
He knows that it is through death and rebirth that this corruptible
shall become incorruptible, and this mortal put on immortality.
Practise as you will on his ignorance, his fears, and his imagination,
with bribes of paradises and threats of hells, there is only one
belief that can rob death of its sting and the grave of its victory;
and that is the belief that we can lay down the burden of our wretched
little makeshift individualities for ever at each lift towards the
goal of evolution, which can only be a being that cannot be improved
upon. After all, what man is capable of the insane self-conceit of
believing that an eternity of himself would be tolerable even to
himself? Those who try to believe it postulate that they shall be
made perfect first. But if you make me perfect I shall no longer be
myself, nor will it be possible for me to conceive my present
imperfections (and what I cannot conceive I cannot remember); so that
you may just as well give me a new name and face the fact that I am a
new person and that the old Bernard Shaw is as dead as mutton. Thus,
oddly enough, the conventional belief in the matter comes to this:
that if you wish to live for ever you must be wicked enough to be
irretrievably damned, since the saved are no longer what they were,
and in hell alone do people retain their sinful nature: that is to
say, their individuality. And this sort of hell, however convenient
as a means of intimidating persons who have practically no honor and
no conscience, is not a fact. Death is for many of us the gate of
hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.
Therefore let us give up telling one another idle stories, and rejoice
in death as we rejoice in birth; for without death we cannot be born
again; and the man who does not wish to be born again and born better
is fit only to represent the City of London in Parliament, or perhaps
the university of Oxford.