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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: it the Will to Live ceases to trouble us, and we are at last
content to achieve the highest happiness of death.
This reduction of the panacea to absurdity was not forced upon
Shelley, because the love which acts as a universal solvent in
his Prometheus Unbound is a sentiment of affectionate benevolence
which has nothing to do with sexual passion. It might, and in
fact does exist in the absence of any sexual interest whatever.
The words mercy and kindness connote it less ambiguously than the
word love. But Wagner sought always for some point of contact
between his ideas and the physical senses, so that people might
not only think or imagine them in the eighteenth century fashion,
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