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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: the foreigners stream out in goodly pleasure parties; the stir
of man's activity is all about him, as he suns himself inertly
in some sheltered corner; and he looks on with a patriarchal
impersonality of interest, such as a man may feel when he
pictures to himself the fortunes of his remote descendants, or
the robust old age of the oak he has planted over-night.
In this falling aside, in this quietude and desertion of
other men, there is no inharmonious prelude to the last
quietude and desertion of the grave; in this dulness of the
senses there is a gentle preparation for the final
insensibility of death. And to him the idea of mortality
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