I am too tired to really write about this now, but I liked this section of John Gray's Straw Dogs:

In his novel Nostromo, Joseph Conrad wrote: ‘Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.’

For those for whom life means action, the world is a stage on which to enact their dreams. Over the past few hundred years, religion has waned, but we have not become less obsessed with imprinting a human meaning on things. A thin secular idealism has become the dominant attitude to life. The world has come to be seen as something to be remade in our own image. The idea that the aim of life is not action but contemplation has almost disappeared.

Those who struggle to change the world see themselves as noble, even tragic figures. Yet most of those who work for world betterment are not rebels against the scheme of things. They seek consolation for a truth they are too weak to bear. At bottom, their faith that the world can be transformed by human will is a denial of their own mortality.

I have been thinking a lot about Hamlet lately. Hamlet's inability to act, to avenge his father, to make things right (whatever that is) is a symptom of his certain knowledge of mortality. He cannot maintain the illusion that we must maintain in order make our lives possible. He knows he will die, as certainly as his father did. As Nietzche said, Hamlet's problem isn' t that he thinks to much. It's that he thinks to well. Some people seem to think that "to be or not to be" is left as an unanswered question, or that it is answered in the affirmative. In fact, Hamlet answers it quite explicity:

There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is't to leave betimes? Let be.

"It" is, of course, his death. If not now, then later. If not later, then now. It is certain. Hamlet's mysterious and inhuman ability to "let be" is a direct result of his certain knowledge of his mortality. And so there you have the greatest work in all of Western thought; and there you have paralysis.