Life Eternal or Eternal Life

[Their singing] must surely be luring all the snakes and ringtail cats and kit foxes and coyotes and great horned owls toward the scene of their happiness.

What then?  A few of the little amphibians will continue their metamorphosis by way of the nerves and tissues of one of the higher animals, in which process the joy of the one becomes the contentment of the second.  Nothing is lost, except an indvidual consciousness here and there, a trivial perhaps even illusory phoenomenon.  The rest survive, mate, multiply, burrow, estivate, dream, and rise again.  The rains will come, the potholes shall be filled.  Again.  And again.  And again.

-- Edward Abbey "Desert Solitaire"