I've allowed you to keep your wicked life for two reasons... And the second reason is so you can tell him, in person, everything that happened here tonight. I want him to witness the extent of my mercy by witnessing your deformed body. I want you to tell him all the information you just told me. I want him to know what I know. I want him to know I want him to know. And I want them all to know they'll all soon be as dead as O-Ren.

— 21st century revenge tragedy

We know as little about subjectivity as we know about death. Our assumption is that the two lead coterminous lives: where the one ends, the other begins, and vice versa. Both the priest and the coroner place a similar wager: the former that our subjectivity transcends the flesh, the latter that our subjectivity depends upon it. However, like God and rationalism, there is no test a thinking man can run to falsify his thought, for it is true that all thinkers must possess the thing to be able to recognize it. Therefore the contemplation of these beginnings and endings has little to do with the possibility of our persistence after death and everything to do with unobtainable knowledge.

In the dark, a heavy stone plummets into a pool and only the sound of the breaking of the surface of the water is our evidence of its disappearance into the deep. There is the throw and the descent and the sound and then the silence, silence the same as before the throw and the descent, silence the same as after. It is likewise indisputable that without our sense of hearing it is impossible to observe the entire process, our eyes being useless instruments in the dark. Our observation ends when the surface of the water is broken.

And so a stone throw into the deep is a show of faith, like death. Both acts wager one's existence for one's freedom from it.