Here's the remainder of my excerpt from Louis J. Halle's 1981 book The Search for an Eternal Norm. (I have to admit that the title always makes me think of the barflies in Cheers shouting "Norm!")
In this passage, Halle reflects on how the "contemplative person," who is under some degree of strain because of the huge gap between his idealized view of the world and the corrupt reality, comes to see death as something less to be feared than to be accepted with relief. Again, comparison with Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy is helpful.
Halle's first paragraph on "the pure man of action" reminds me of John Wayne's dread of dying, which I discussed in an older post.
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The pure man of action does not, ordinarily, allow his mind to dwell on the approach of death. When advancing years and the progressive impairment of his faculties do, at last, force him to think of it, he anticipates it with horror and hopes that he can continue to keep it far from the real present in which he still lives his life of action.
In all contemplative persons, by contrast, there is likely to be something like a love of death that develops as they grow older. I do not mean that they are in the hurry to end their lives. It is merely that they find solace in the thought:
That no man lives forever,
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
To one who does not find himself at home in the existential world his own passage through it may seem like that of a man crossing a chasm on a tightrope. Especially in youth, with his career ahead of him, he may doubt that he can ever make it to the other side; but he finds himself committed simply by the astonishing circumstance that here he is, having in his first consciousness found his feet already on the rope and the chasm open beneath him. As the years of his life pass, then, as his career takes its direction and lengthens out, he may feel an increasing self-confidence. Now he is halfway across the chasm, now two thirds across, within sight of the end–and now he feels some assurance that he can make it all the way. Having already gone so far, he has become experienced, he has acquired a knack, and he looks back with a certain pity at his first awkward steps in a past that has come to seem remote. At the same time, however, he is conscious of how the strain continues, never allowing him to relax from effort; he is conscious of continuing fear, based on the continuing danger exemplified by so many others who, at every stage of the crossing, fall into unexpected disaster; and he feels increasingly the weariness that accumulates in one's bones as one goes on through so many decades. Under the circumstances, the farther shore begins to seem like a haven. Here at last is the end of striving and the end of fear. Here at last is perfect sleep. When he thinks that this sleep may well be one from which he will never awaken he may be glad that it is not already upon him–but since it must come anyway, if not sooner than later, he is not offered a choice. The option of living and suffering forever in this existential world, with never any rest, never any surcease from anxiety, with griefs and disasters succeeding one another through eternity–this option, which might well be regarded as intolerable, does not present itself for his consideration. Either he will realize the full design, completing his life at the farther shore, or he will fall into the chasm before he gets there; and in either case there will be the same finality of eternal oblivion, if that is what death represents.…
This love of death is elemental in Hamlet, and it grows with his increasing maturity under the stress of circumstances. Death is constantly in his thoughts….
His acceptance of death is, in fact, what accounts for the marked change we see in him upon his return from England, when he stops to contemplate the spectacle of the gravedigger singing at his work. Already he is half in love with death as he muses over the skulls that the goodman delver tosses up with his spade. Death, as he here contemplates it, reduces the successes and failures of life to indifference… Eventually, in his increasingly objective vision, he and the usurping King and all will be reduced to skulls like these, “chapless, and knocked about the mazzard with a sexton's spade.”…
At last, when death is no longer more than minutes away, his feelings are almost but not quite unmixed. There is still, as there must be, a note of regret and misgiving. (“Thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about my heart.”) It is only a note, however, lacking the mortal anguish of which his earlier self had been capable, when he had repeatedly confronted the prospect of death only to turn away from it. Now he can console himself that “there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” In his last words to Horatio, as he lies dying, he calls upon him not to join him in death for the time being but, rather, to absent himself from “felicity” a while. By contrast with his agony of spirit in the first half of the play, the serenity that goes with this acceptance of death constitutes a happy ending to tragedy.
[from The Search for an Eternal Norm, 1981, Louis J. Halle]