Time Flies. People Fall.

Finality.  Such a fearsome word.  The end is the only certainty; this too shall pass.  Us.  Life.  We dream up various caricatures of death or the avoiding of it.  Be it the lumbering undead or immortal beings, death is an obsession, an addiction, and we're afraid of it.

Take all that you are, everything that mattered to you, and everything that forged your personal character.  Take it away.  We're afraid death will remove us from memory, from existence.  Will people remember us when we're gone?

The metaphor of this entirety of our cultures obsession with death is no better exemplified by "The Falling Girl" by Dino Buzzati.  Marta, at nineteen years of age, leaps off the edge of a skyscraper.  On the way down, time seems to slow.  People ask her where she's going, why she's headed to her destination.  As she progresses further down, she begins to notice others falling with her, as well as her finding of her own insecurity; she compared herself to the others.  Near the end, she becomes aware of her age, which progressed with the drop in altitude.  Before she even hits the ground, she becomes nothing more than dust.

Buzzati miraculously juxtaposes the thought of suicide and living one's life.  People always restless, moving, and trying to make it somewhere have already killed who they are.  They just haven't hit the ground yet.  Marta always said she was going somewhere, and was hopeful about it, and she looked back during her fall to see the skyscraper, which was once beautiful, sweet.  It became sinister and cold as it stared back.  "You could have done differently," it may as well have whispered back at her.  During the descent, Marta became increasingly unsatisfied with herself.  Regretful is a choice word.

Does leaving a legacy behind truly matter?  What is the point of being alive if living is a secondary goal?  I would argue that Buzzati is trying to tell us this very thing.  Falling is irreversible once we jump.  Why take the plunge before we're ready?