Life & Mortality Quote by George MacDonald

MacDonald takes a scalpel to one of the most rehearsed human reflexes: panic at the ending. The line works because it yokes two departures we treat as opposites. Sunset is loss made gorgeous, an extinction we routinely applaud. Death is the same structural event - a going-out - yet we meet it with dread. By calling that dread "strange", he doesn’t just soothe; he indicts. Fear isn’t presented as wisdom or survival instinct but as a learned, culturally overvalued response.

The subtext is theological without being preachy. MacDonald, steeped in Christian imagination and Victorian debates about faith, progress, and an increasingly mechanized view of the self, implies that we have misread the grammar of endings. A sunset suggests continuity: darkness arrives, but the world doesn’t collapse; morning is implied even when it isn’t seen. He smuggles in an argument for trust - not necessarily in doctrine, but in the possibility that what feels like an absolute stop is actually a transition our senses can’t track.

The intent is also rhetorical: the question mark forces the reader into a small, uncomfortable self-audit. If we can stand on a hill and watch the light die with something like gratitude, what exactly are we afraid of when a life closes? Not cessation, perhaps, but meaninglessness, solitude, unfinished business - the modern anxieties a sunset doesn’t trigger. MacDonald’s genius is to reframe death less as horror and more as an aesthetic and moral inconsistency: we fear the wrong kind of night.