Separation is not death, but as an impending element in psychic life it can and does mobilise passions of the greatest intensity. Death on the other hand is most certainly separation - even if many of those who die do not do so in full consciousness, and despite a certain set of beliefs that imagines life after death to be quite continuous with life before death - Christ's last words are evidence enough for this. That there is a tearing up by the roots may be known from an examination of all the little deaths, otherwise thought of as big changes, that we experience in the course of a life. Self-consciousness on the brink of death must relinquish its absorption in its worldly context and return to the barest own-being. It may then see that it was only ever for itself and that the engrossment in the world masked the fact that the world had never been and could never be its foundation, its final metaphysical ground, but that it persistently seemed as though it did. To be born, with all that that short word entails, into a place is naturally to be rooted in the beliefs of that place; to begin to awaken, to begin to know, is to know nothing else than this, and to revel in its massive richness and its contradictions. Such beliefs are never simple or explicit, but reach down into metaphysical depths where the nature of being and the origin and purpose of life are secured. The active soul in its worldly engagement draws on this reserve for the implicit knowledge of itself, for the cardinal values that orient its being, for identity, in short. It is the heir to all the levels and can make what it can with them, art or crime. To reverse the process of putting out roots, however, is to discover that what seemed to be deepest nativity and seamless communion was a dream-like illusion which did not touch the innermost subject. To realise as a subject entirely lacking in identity is to be utterly forsaken. This insight may last only for the duration of the final conflagration or mark the passage to something unspeakable.