The end of things always looks surprisingly like the beginning. Call it the circle of life, the cycle of nature, or whatever cheap colloquialism you want, but for some reason, whenever I see a dying man, lying in bed, fatally alone, I always think of my birth. Not that I can remember it much, but I seem to have a sense of it… the kind of opening to the light that popular culture has associated with death. A shocking onset of something profoundly new that blankets us in unimaginable cold… the unknown bleeding into us and restructuring our conceptions of self and dependence… our support, our sustenance, our security, dissolving. We are driven headlong into transformation… taken… changed… downloaded… repeated… perhaps closer to perfection.