Life & Mortality Quote by Edward Young

Life, for Young, isn’t a bustling marketplace of meaning; it’s a desert. The line lands with the hard clarity of a poet who made his name writing about night, grief, and the soul’s long walk. Calling life “the desert” and “the solitude” doesn’t just sound bleak, it reframes ordinary existence as spiritual exile: you move through days as if through sand, separated from others by the sheer fact of being a single consciousness. The repetition (“life is... life the...”) works like a tolling bell, turning a philosophical claim into a litany.

The sting comes in the pivot: “death joins us to the great majority.” Young doesn’t romanticize death as reunion with loved ones or a noble finale. He treats it as mass membership, the one club that never rejects applicants. The phrase “great majority” is slyly statistical, almost bureaucratic, and that coldness is the point: death is the only true commonwealth, the only democratic institution in a world where life feels isolating and unequal.

Context matters. Young wrote in an era fascinated by “memento mori,” when religious certainties were still culturally loud but personal loss (and social upheaval) made mortality feel intimate. The subtext is both consoling and chastening: if life is solitude, stop pretending you can outrun it with status or noise; if death is majority, live with the urgency of someone temporarily outside the crowd.