Ode to the Nightingale

Yesterday, I discussed about death. Today, in Keats's Ode to the Nightingale, he talked life's intolerable and his half in love with easful Death like a draught of wine and fall a sleep and ceased forever. An other way of coping with life's intolerably is using imagination to escape from life's hardship. However, in his last conclusion in this poem, his imaginative power only can help him escape from life temporarily.

I had thought of easful death like the handling of uncured animals by injection to put them down in a humanistic way. There is no argument in managing comfortable dying for animals by lots of argument in managing human's comfortable death. If you are rich enough, you can arrange your death as comfortable as you wish to avoid suffering dying in Swissland where it has law to legalize this kind of death but not as easy as you live in most of the countries that do not legalize arranging death.

In traditional value in Confucius teaching, it emphasis how to arrange parents' funeral in a proper way to show respectful to the ancestors. They do not think of how to die respectfully. To die by arrangement is an issue in modern society which medical advance makes life last longer than they should be naturally and that makes the life for the illness person unbearable.

If we can help the dogs and cats cease in a humanistic way, it is much more a moral issue to help the uncured person to die comfortablly and respectfully as he or she wishes and arranges. And that is my wish for my death too if I come into this stage.

After sharing my view of how to die, Ode to the Nightingale also makes me think of how to cope with suffering in life. Keats' talked about using a draught of wine to make you forget the pain of life but he used his own imagination to avoid life's despair and misable. However, he did know that it would not take you away from life's reality. You still have to face your daily life. Even though it is true that we cannot quit from life by imagination, we can choose the picture of our inner world. When we come to a situation like terminal illness or situation that we cannot control our suffering, one thing we still can control is to creat our inner mind. It is not fantasy or ways to fool yourselves. It is a way to heal and a way of empowerment yourself. You choose to think something good, something that much appeal to yourself that you know that it is your imagination and it is not true but it is good. That is what Keats talking about the Truth of the Imagination.

It is a defference between mental illness and the power of imagination. In mental illness,  patient creat an illusion that they do not aware and think it is the reality to help them to cope with life's stress. What I think of the power of imagination is the mental power that you choose to focus your mind in something that is favourable and good for you.  The person who use this power know that it is his imagination not the reality but refer to his inner world, it is true and it is his own reality he choose. I think, we can creat this ability or power in our daily life if we cultivate our intelligence in literature and art, we can create and stay more in a beautiful inner world which can be true. That is like what Keats said in his Ode on the Grecian Urn: Beauty is truth, true beauty.